Healthcare. Now that’s a loaded term these days. What can we do to create a solution? First of all, we might start with the people involved.
Buying healthcare services is like no other purchase process.
When people make big purchases, they’ve usually done their research and know exactly what they’re paying for. For instance, automobile information is everywhere. And that’s why no one walks up to their local dealership and says “I’ll take that one and decide later if it’s really what I need and if I can afford it.” Information allows people to avoid big financial and personal burdens. But in the healthcare industry, information that helps to make a balanced decision that directly impacts quality of life can be hard to come by. The traditional healthcare information infrastructure does not invite the patient to be involved in understanding exactly what a medical course of action could entail and how much it could cost. The doctor’s role is to do what’s best for the health of the patient, versus administer the financial aspects of the treatment and services. So, healthcare professionals focus on keeping patients healthy, but patients end up receiving the financial information months after the treatment.
People confuse health insurance with healthcare.
Because provider services including hospitals, exams and pharmaceuticals are out of reach monetarily for most Americans, insurance companies are seen as the gatekeepers of healthcare. Instead of looking first to our individual healthcare needs and then purchasing a policy accordingly, many Americans first select a plan which becomes a proxy for healthcare choices, further complicating how an individual is entangled in finding a healthcare solution.
Because healthcare and health insurance are so intertwined, finding a solution for one part of the problem just doesn’t work. We might as well be plugging a small crack in the dam while water seeps through other, equally vulnerable points.
To be a part of something better, we have to think differently about healthcare, health insurance, and how they’re related. To build a solution we need to:
1.) Help create ways for people to manage healthcare using health insurance as one of many significant tools. This would mean that people could shop smarter for health insurance and get access to the healthcare they need, while managing the financial impact of it in real-time.
2.) Re-think the ultimate external factor: our lifestyles. For many Americans, a sedentary lifestyle fueled by poor food choices has become the norm, causing a myriad of health problems. By breaking out of this cycle, Americans could lessen lifestyle-associated diseases and conditions, as well as the high costs that come with them.
3.) Change the existing information flows about healthcare choices to improve patient outcomes both physically and financially.
There is no single solution that will change the factors building momentum toward a healthcare meltdown. Instead, we need many ideas from which evolutionary and revolutionary solutions will be developed.
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How will this apply to us? Take a virus like H1N1 as an example—immediate detection and strain identification can help protect the masses and make responding appropriately to unknown diseases faster and easier—which could mean saving lives.
