But Who's The Customer?

As I toodle around town in my 2013 hybrid, there are still dashboard digital tools that I can’t figure out.  Currently, I’m told—every time I start my car—that my spare tire kit needs attention.  Mind you, there is NO spare tire; just a facsimile, and I don’t know how to remove it from the dashboard - and my consciousness.  

This message is just one of many delivered by Ford by means of unsettling blinking lights designed to urgently grab my attention. It may not be telling me about my actual nonexistent spare tire, but it certainly reveals where their priorities line up.   As you can detect from my irritability, I am dumbstruck by the fealty to the car manufacturer and not the car owner, a paying customer.

This irritating part of my life reminds me of another meddlesome imposition on seniors like me: hospital workflows that improve the lives of physicians at the expense of the patient.  I recently read that AI is being utilized to make physician’s jobs easier by compressing the time to update patient notes from an average of two hours a day, down to only 15-20 minutes.  Who doesn’t want that amount of time back each day?  (And I certainly don’t begrudge them the time.)

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But the current grousing topic de jour in my home is not AI, it is the simple conundrum of scheduling an appointment with a physician.  When my wife or I need to see a doctor at Kaiser for a non-urgent medical issue, we must raise our hand and wait for a call back from a scheduling assistant.  An assistant who only works with phones; no asynchronous messaging.  They call, leave a voice mail, and require a call back on a different number than the one used to reach us.  We listen to the voice mail, write down the new toll-free number, call back and learn that “Barbara is currently busy with another member.” And if you were frustrated reading through the previous sentences, imagine how unnerving phone tag becomes when it  for a day, week or longer, and your aging body is in discomfort, and you don’t know why.

Doximity underscores my grievance in a study they published.  Ease of use for physicians was studied by disease state, male/female, physician age, text/voice/video, subspecialty, etc.  But if there are no patients, then what would doctors do?  They need us.  Businesses created to facilitate physician/patient interaction should be laser focused on us, the patients.  Homage to a physician’s sacred workflow has taken precedence over patient convenience for far too long.  Not only do they need us, but I do sincerely believe that the vast majority of doctors truly care about patients like us - I suspect the business of healthcare is to blame.

This slide from near the end of the Doximity study underscores my bias.  The graph above assesses the features that are most important to enable patients to effectively access telemedicine.  Fortunately, after all that salivating over physician engagement, the patient is considered. And just to be clear, the patient should be the first priority, not the last.

At Healthrageous, we are fiercely and intentionally attentive to the seniors we serve.  Our business model prioritizes ease of use - for our seniors, not for the business. 50% of our Chinese-speaking MA members in San Bernadino County, for instance, are interacting with our SMS platform asynchronously and entirely in Chinese.  They are choosing and ordering meals, pausing when going on vacation, and rating taste and variety.  A relentless passion for serving seniors with the amount of digital connectivity they choose and in their native language has helped Healthrageous achieve a meaningful differentiation in the marketplace.  If your MA plan is more focused on members than providers or hospitals, we are the firm that will accelerate your member growth.

And to underscore my team’s commitment to those we serve, please meet Don Mannarino. Just yesterday, our customer service team received this email from him, which I am proudly sharing in its untarnished entirety. For context, Don lives inside the gates of a fairgrounds, so deliveries are tricky at best. I’ll let him take it from here. 

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