The way some people tell it, most patients are ignorant, unmotivated consumers of health care who’d rather seek the opinion of a doughnut vendor in the hospital lobby than do the actual research it takes to find a qualified doctor.
Harsh words? They come from Dr. Jon Cohen, a vascular surgeon and chief medical officer at Quest Diagnostics, who spoke last week at the annual TEDMED conference in Washington, D.C.
Among some of the excerpts from his talk: The average American spends more time deciding which TV to buy than choosing a physician. Consumers are more likely to judge the quality of their health care on the basis of service – whether the parking was convenient and how long they spent in the waiting room – than on the basis of the actual care they received and whether it was clinically appropriate and effective.
Finally, most people just aren’t motivated enough to be good consumers of health care, Dr. Cohen concluded. “Consumer-driven health care doesn’t work because people don’t want health care.”
Ouch.
There’s some truth to this. But in saying it, Dr. Cohen has unwittingly exposed the gulf that often lies between patients and health care professionals – namely, that they approach the patient experience from entirely different perspectives and an entirely different fund of knowledge. And it’s a mistake to write off the patient’s behavior as uninformed or unmotivated or unconsumer-like without considering the validity of the health care experience from their point of view.
The TEDMED folks unfortunately haven’t yet posted a video of Dr. Cohen’s speech, so I’m relying here on secondhand reports of what he said. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt by assuming he meant to give his audience some food for thought rather than bashing on consumers.
But the whole tenor of his talk raises some pretty interesting questions: If it’s so hard to get Americans to think like well-informed, thoughtful health care consumers, whose fault is it (if, indeed, “fault” is the word we want to use)? If people aren’t better health care consumers, is it because they don’t want to be, or is it because they’re being held back by how the current system functions? If patients make decisions on the basis of different values and beliefs than clinicians, does this invariably make them wrong?
A glimpse of the online reaction that emerged this weekend in response to the TEDMED conference suggests people feel rather strongly about the issue. A commenter at the Wall Street Journal called it “a typical paternalistic surgeon perspective. Everybody is dumber than they are, and nobody can make a decision as well as they do.”
“Let’s get real here,” opined someone else. “If the consumer had transparency into key drivers like, quality, cost, access and could have a ‘real’ discussion with care providers then maybe the average consumer could become a good health care consumer… The insurance companies, pharma companies and the provider communities need to check their ego at the door and actual[ly] SERVE their patients as CONSUMERS.”
Bunk, argued another commenter. Patients don’t behave like consumers because their health insurance cushions them from the cost of their care and they have no financial incentive to shop around for quality or cost-effectiveness.
The mHealth Insight blog has another point of view: “I don’t think we should be blaming the key stakeholders (patients) for the way they make choices but focusing on the failure of healthcare providers to bring transparency to the services they offer.”
For what it’s worth, I suspect a lot of people want to become more informed as patients and health care consumers. No, wait, make that: I know a lot of people want to become better patients and health care consumers. But the system doesn’t make it easy for them, and I think Dr. Cohen is dead wrong in his assertion that “intense desire trumps all barriers” to becoming good health care consumers.
Whenever the topic turns to patient empowerment, it seems to stumble into a double bind: Patients are told they should be more engaged and involved in their care, yet they’re given few tools for doing so. They’re lectured for not doing more yet the expectations are often set woefully low on the assumption they’re not smart enough to get it anyway (the assertion that most people don’t really want to be good health consumers being a case in point). One minute they’re exhorted; the next, they’re undermined.
Could patients do more to educate and advocate for themselves? Of course they can, and should. Sheer desire isn’t always enough, however, to overcome systemic barriers and the weight of a health care culture that’s still of two minds whether to accept that patients are indeed capable of becoming more involved partners in their care. If patients are falling short at being good health care consumers, it would seem there’s plenty of blame to spread around.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
