The Future of Healthcare in the 21st Century
One of the most significant achievements in the health care field is the
emergence of the nurse as an integral and active coordinator and initiator of patient
care. Professional care standards, physicians, and patients will continue to have
increased expectations of nursing performance. With the increased demands, there
also has been an increased need for current education for nursing personnel. These
times are fraught with increased lawsuits by a get rich quick society.
I believe that the only way that nursing personnel can constantly increase their
knowledge base is through Internet transfer of knowledge base.
New Healthcare consumers:
New consumers-people who have the analytical sophistication that comes with
information technologies to use them for comparison shopping-have transformed many
industries in the U.S., including banking, investment, and retail. They have grown from
25 percent of the population twenty years ago to 45 percent today. By 2005, they will
constitute 52 percent of the population. This report describes the extent to which the
new consumer will have an impact on the purchase and delivery of health care services
in the next three to seven years.
Five core currents
Health care players will have to address five core currents to help stay on top of the new
consumer wave in the next few years:
- Choice-new consumers want to be involved in all types of choices related to their
health care, including choice of plans, providers, and treatments.
- Control-new consumers are more active, more engaged, and more involved in their
health care.
- Customer service-new consumers will demand from their health care services the
same superior customer service they demand from retail and finance.
- Branding-given the overwhelming glut of information the new consumer faces,
strong brands will cut through to reach them.
- Information-new consumers are hungry for information about their health and health care. When they don't get it, they become frustrated.
Barriers to and Drivers of Consumer-Focused Health Care
Several barriers will slow the pace at which new consumers are able to transform
the health care system. These include:
- A gap in information and authority between consumers and providers-physicians
have been to medical school and know more than consumers.
- The infrequency of health care purchases and consumers' vulnerability when they
make them.
- The difficulty of measuring and comparing the quality and price of health services.
- A supply-driven health care market, where third party payers mediate the
physician/patient relationship.
- At the same time, several factors will accelerate the move toward consumer-driven
health care in America. These include:
- A shift in self-perception of patients from passive recipients of medical care to active
consumers of health services, including a cultural shift in the relationship between
patients and physicians that "pops the God bubble" that once surrounded doctors.
- The growth of accessible and inexpensive sources of information about health
insurance, physicians, hospitals, and other parts of the health care system.
- Rising out-of-pocket costs that force consumers to think more about the cost and quality trade-offs of their health care services.
- Growth in choice of providers through the more open provider networks becoming
common among insurance plans.
The past few years have seen amazing
advances in understanding the cause
and morphology of various human diseases
and disorders, from breast cancer to
Alzheimer's disease and even AIDS. Much
of this progress has been made possible by the
Human Genome Project and its advances in
understanding human genetics. Scientists to-day
know much more about how to locate
genes and decipher their secrets.
Copyright © May 2000 by Ken Jones. If you have any pediatric educational needs,
write me a 
