Consumer empowerment, a fixture in such industries as retail products, travel, and banking, is taking shape in health care at last. But only because consumers finally have to get involved in their own care to head off things like higher insurance premiums and workplace penalties for poor health.

Meanwhile, health care providers are headed into the community to track down consumers and help keep them well. Incentives embedded in Medicare programs to share savings from more efficient and effective care have spawned all manner of inventiveness to promote health and intervene early when a chronically sick person is in danger of getting much sicker.

This intersection of like motivations for consumers and caregivers is creating a remarkable opportunity for entrepreneurs to market digital products that people can stand on, strap on, or wear to yield information valuable to their ongoing health. That same information is valuable to new health management cooperatives such as accountable care organizations.

Health consumerism has been anticipated ever since the Internet first debuted. But the forecast rise of consumerism failed to gain momentum until several forces came together. High insurance deductibles and other cost sharing increased consumer “skin in the game” and provided motivation to seek out advice on self-care. Meanwhile, health care providers had incentives dangled in front of them that require greater patient engagement in order to collect.

Hospitals and physicians now have to be concerned about Medicare patient satisfaction surveys, publicized on a government web site and figuring into formulas for reimbursing them for their services. Incentives from value-measuring programs of Medicare and private insurers can be boiled down to this: keep people healthy or intervene early in failing health, get a bonus check.

Tracking and monitoring consumers’ health status
With the growing importance of consumer welfare and its tie to reimbursement, health care providers need every advantage to track and monitor consumers’ health status more effectively and efficiently.

Presentations on wearable technology over the years usually started with the lead-in, “Imagine if …” Not anymore. Ralph Lauren is developing a stylish polo shirt that can measure calories burned, heart data, distance traveled and other health-related details. Other products such as the Apple Watch are providing personalized ways to collect data, get feedback and take action. Health care providers are better understanding the people to whom they are accountable for health costs and outcomes.

That includes both hands-on care and the steps they take to encourage healthy habits after patients head home. The odds of consumers achieving better health increase with the use of such products as smart patches to gather vital signs continuously, with little or no need to train consumers to use them. Further lifting these technologies out of the realm of mere curiosities are advances in the analysis of large amounts of data for trends, warnings and suggestions regarding personal health.

For health care providers, engaging consumers throughout the health management process is the first step to monetize the emerging health care economy. For example, one large health care provider reduced its costs by using care management software to track a specific patient population suffering from chronic conditions.

From group monitoring chronic illnesses to individual best outcomes
It started with the grouping of people with similar chronic illnesses and specifying types of medical interventions and patient self-care that a certain illness called for. Then the progress in making sure these things happened was tracked through extensive care management notes enabled by the software.

The upshot: the organization identified what health care interventions tended to work for which condition, and for which consumer profile. The true success in reducing costs was in engaging patients, honing interventions and discouraging costly procedures.

Consumer-centric shifts are making an impact on the major components of health care. For payors, the long-time dependence on taking medical information from insurance claims is being replaced by continuous feeds of health status data required for timely patient care. For medical devices, the shift means they must be integrated into the system to feed data to the overall system.

Entities throughout the health care value chain will have to navigate a new world emphasizing documented excellence, customer obsession and solid health data to monetize the consumer-centered payoff in delivering a truly coordinated and differentiated set of services to the consumer.

About the author: Bipin Thomas is a global thought-leader on consumer-centric health care transformation. Thomas is the chairman of ICURO, a consumer-centric care outcomes research and digital health management organization, where he is redefining personalized care delivery by connecting all stakeholders in the emerging consumer-centric health care ecosystem.