Why Consumerism Should Be 99 Percent Invisible

The woman leaving the hospital should have been watching where she was walking rather than speaking on her phone. She did not see the sinkhole until she fell into it, at which point see could see it in detail. The doctor, upon seeing her in the hole, asked if she was okay. Learning that she was in pain, he wrote her a prescription and dropped it into the hole.

A few minutes later, the hospital’s director of revenue assurance walked past the hole. She too inquired about her health, then opened her briefcase and dropped an insurance claim form into the hole. “You should complete the form,” she said, “but I don’t think having fallen into a sinkhole is covered under your plan.”

The chief patient experience officer happened upon the woman and wanted to know what had happened. Speaking with her for a few minutes, he asked the woman, “How was your experience with us prior to falling in the hole? Would you mind filling out this patient experience survey?” He asked, tossing the survey — along with a pen — into the hole, and left.

The woman considered her predicament. She thought, at least I can occupy my time by filling out the forms until I am rescued.

A consultant who goes by the moniker, the Voice of Reason, then came along. He assessed the situation, and jumped into the hole.

“Now we’re both stuck,” she said.

“That’s okay,” I told her. “I’ve been in this hole before and I know the way out.”

If you try to recast consumerism and access and engagement and experience on your own, you may find yourself in the same position as the woman — with a lot of meaningless assistance.

My experience tells me that most efforts to improve it do so without any knowledge of what their efforts should look like when they are done.

Here’s a big hint. If you design it correctly — and you must design it — it should not look like anything. Consumerism, access, engagement, and experience should be 99 percent invisible to your patients and consumers. And that 99 percent should all happen behind the scenes. It should be built into your consumerism architecture and platform. The one percent seen by the patients and consumers is the hands-on user experience.

It helps if you think of it this way. Consider your tablet or phone and the underlying operating system: iOS, Android, and Windows. Your devices are easy to use. Their use is intuitive. What you see is the one percent; far more than 99 percent of what makes them easy to use is invisible. The hardware, the architecture, the processes, and the applications were designed, and users were involved in every step. It is called human-centered-design. Users knew the design would meet their needs and be simple to use before a single line of code was written.

The good news for healthcare consumerism is that a lot of the difficult work has been done for you. The devices and the operating systems already exist. The only remaining task is for healthcare to define what it wants to do with those tools.

Healthcare can design an experience for patients and consumers on those devices that can do everything they want, and it can be designed in a way to give them the experience they want.

Healthcare has almost everything it needs to recast consumerism. The only thing missing is defining what it should look like when it’s done and someone with the will to do it.

[This piece was originally published on Paul Roemer’s blog, Disrupting Patient Access & Experience. To follow him on Twitter, click here.]