Or if you elected to share your body narrative with your primary care team, you might expect that team to help you avoid adverse events through predictive modeling based on real-time information and a consumer outreach capability. So, if a consumer is sharing blood sugar levels, her care team will know if she is drinking a six-pack of soda every Friday or having pancakes for Sunday morning breakfast — because the digital body narrative will show it. All of a sudden, your simple wrist bracelet helps you to avoid an acute event that sends you to the emergency department and your bracelet becomes a vital part of how you live.
In the movement from fee-for-service to value-based payment, it is the job of the health system to keep the population for which they are accountable healthy. Without quantified self-data, that’s almost impossible. And with it, there can be transformational change in the relationship between the population health manager and the consumer.
H&HN: What will consumers demand from health care providers going forward?
Main: Vastly better everything, but in six big categories:
For starters, personalization that includes bridging health and wellness. Consumers will expect their health system to have a much deeper understanding of their needs, to think of them in an integrated way and connect the things that matter about how they live to what their health is. And then, to be significantly more predictive and preventive in their approach — real-time digital narratives along with predictive models will make this happen.
Category 2 is to completely redefine convenience, access and the protection of data. So, when I have a convenient care need, I can do it at Walgreens, at home through telehealth or in a primary care office, 24 hours a day seven days a week. And consumers can be comfortable sharing their body narrative in a safe and protected environment and not have to worry about a cyberattack.
Category 3: Best-in-class quality. As consumers learn more, they will expect 100 percent use of evidence-based guidelines when they exist. And they will expect evidence-based care to be personalized as it gets informed with the next generation of advanced blood-based diagnostics and genomics. And they will expect zero unwarranted practice variation.
Consumers are going to expect Category 4 — transparency — to go along with social and community sharing. They will expect transparency on price, experience, quality, outcomes, real-time waiting times; they will expect crowdsourcing; and they will expect providers to facilitate access to social communities like Patients Like Me.
In Category 5 — active engagement and partnered health — consumers are going to expect the coach to call them at home. They’re going to expect to be able to plug in their quantified self-data and share their body narrative. They’re going to expect providers to actually engage them and give them guidance on how to eat, manage stress and help them move to better living.
And Category 6, which will happen over probably a 10-year horizon, is that they are going to expect providers to help them navigate precision medicine. Many consumers who have high-risk profiles are going to want to participate in programs like those being conducted by Human Longevity and HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology and begin to develop a genomic profile that will let them understand their biomarkers and engage in decade-early preventions that are going to help them live better.
That’s a big list. But tell me, as a consumer, wouldn’t you want all those things? I know I do. — Lola Butcher is a contributing writer to H&HN. •
