phenomenalplace

The dynamic has changed. With the advent of HCAPHS and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) consumer satisfaction is no longer a nice too have but a got to have in healthcare. Difficult to achieve and tough to beat once you have it, consumer satisfaction with your medical services, regardless of the monikers we place on them, will drive volume and revenue. Revenue for the standpoint of Pay-for-Performance (P4P) programs and volume from consumers selecting you in a very "commoditized" and provider undifferentiated healthcare market place. As you create your networks, Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), Medical Homes (MHs) and other yet undefined organizations, you have the opportunity to "get it right" this time. For the past 10 years, I have been writing and working within healthcare organizations to improve satisfaction. Ten years ago, I had the opportunity to coauthor a book with Ralph Bell, PhD., on satisfaction entitled- How to Use Patient Satisfaction Data to Impro...

Even six months after the passage of major health reform legislation, you still hear almost daily rumblings that the American public is unhappy with health reform. Many view this unhappiness as a sign that health reform should be repealed. But is that what the unhappiness is really saying? According to a recent AP poll , the numbers of Americans who think the law should have done more actually outnumber those who think the government should stay out of health care by 2-to-1. Further, about four in 10 adults think the new law did not go far enough to change the health care system, regardless of whether they support the law, oppose it or remain neutral, the AP poll found. In both the "get out of healthcare" faction and the "do-more" group, broad majorities said health insurance, medical care, and prescription drugs all cost too much. In both groups, most feel that the system should aim to increase the number of insured people and let Americans get the care they need, ...

Now that health reform’s six-month anniversary has come and gone (and many provisions just took effect), you could be thinking that the hoopla over health reform might quiet down for a bit. Think again. For most companies, the health plan open enrollment season is rapidly approaching. What will companies do in terms of talking about health reform in this year’s open enrollment materials? Good question and one that the folks at HighRoads , an employer health care compliance company, have just addressed in a new survey. According to HighRoads, 75 percent of employers plan to address the effect of health-care reform in their open enrollment materials. In fact, 63 percent of respondents are creating new communication materials specifically for the communication of health-care reform. The companies responding represented communication practices for 1.5 million total employees. “The changes demanded by the Health Care Reform Act and other recent legislation such as mental health parity and F...

The Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) will temporarily disregard certain changes in an insured group health plan's contribution rate which normally would cause the plan to lose its grandfathered plan status under health reform. In newly released guidance (in the form of frequently asked questions (FAQ)) on implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, EBSA addressed a variety of issues raised by employers and insurers, including insurers' concerns that they do not always have the information needed to know whether (or when) an employer plan sponsor changes its rate of contribution towards the cost of group health plan coverage. This is important because the interim final regulations on grandfathered plans provide that a group health plan or health insurance coverage will cease to be a grandfathered health plan if the employer decreases its contribution rate towards the cost of coverage by more than 5 percentage points b...

In the new world of healthcare where price and quality are the key drivers of an informed consumer, sharing a much greater burden of the cost, will begin to demand experiences online that they commonly have with other companies. Online represents a great opportunity for consumer directed healthcare organizations to break from the pack and create an online healthcare experience that is memorable and exceeds an individuals or families experience, expectations. Are you ready for the challenge? Most healthcare sites today are static containing the usual about us, our services location, etc., etc., etc. Little use of video or other creative ways to engage the customer. Notice that I said customer and not patient. Not everyone that comes to your site is a patient or will be a patient. They are consumers looking for information. Could be a competitor too. In any case, when you look at your site, does it: Delight your customer? Create sustainable differentiation? Is adaptable to new opportun...

You know that joke about the farmer whose cows are not producing enough milk? A university panel gathers under the leadership of a theoretical physicist. They analyze each aspect of the problem thoroughly and carefully, and after much deliberation produce a report, the first line of which is "First, assume a spherical cow in a vacuum". This joke has become short-hand for some of the reductionist thinking in theoretical physics, but it can just as easily personify the field of statistics, upon which we rely so heavily to inform our evidence-based practices. Here is what I mean. Let us look at four common applications of statistical principles. First, descriptive statistics, usually represented by Table 1 in a paper, in which we are interested in understanding the measures of central tendency such as the mean and median values. I would argue that both measures are somewhat flawed in the real world. As we all learned, a mean is a bona fide measure of central tendency in a norma...