I attended an intriguing presentation last week at one of my professional organizations, the Knoxville Area Medical Group Management Association. Wally Hankwitz, president of Highlands Health Management, discussed the complexities of a medical practice in today’s world.
Wally’s presentation lead me to ponder how the Internet has empowered you and me…the American consumers…to become much more discriminating and proactive in dealing with our personal health (and that of our families).
Now that “we patients” perceive that we’re being forced to pay more for healthcare (higher premiums, heftier deductibles, rising drug costs), many of us have become “empowered shoppers” by using the phone, email and the Internet to:
- Compare prices and quality measures of procedures (especially elective ones)
- Surf the Internet learning about medical conditions (think WebMD.com)
- Complain more freely about inferior medical providers and borderline treatment…spurring on public reporting, (which in theory, drives transparency)
- Embrace more tools to “rate” physicians. Did you know that ZAGAT (yes, ZAGAT of the restaurant reviews) has in place a physician review website, already active in several states? You can search by location, look up by name, and rate the physician on a set of variables such as trust, communication, availability, and environment.
What’s next on the horizon? One of Wally’s slides lists physician pay for performance and “no pay for negative outcomes”…
The changing face of the medical world is truly your face, my face… altering many aspects of the landscape of consumer driven healthcare. As more technological tools become available to empower us, we now have more of a “say” in our own personal medical situations and decisions.
The challenge? Taking the time to seek out and master some of those tools…and gathering up the courage to question the former medical status quo.
