Improving Access to Care: How Health Systems Can Overcome the Obstacles

Assuring timely access to care — an individual’s ability to obtain health care services — has always challenged payers, providers, and without doubt, consumers. The industry’s constant back-and-forth blame game over cost and access must end. Customers are listening, and so are competitors.

Lindsay R. Resnick

Recent market moves are making care more widely available than ever before. Billions upon billions of dollars are being invested in products and services that promise expanded access. The combination of retail clinics, telemedicine, homecare, digital health, and public/private insurance options has opened the access floodgates for many Americans. But access to care continues to be problematic. The thinking is that if you build it, they will come. But can they?

With a rapidly expanding set of new community-based retail health outlets, integration, and alignment with competitive “frenemies” is critical. The pace, number, and size of transactions won’t let up anytime soon. Uncertainty and volatility will continue while markets are disrupted, and competitors disintermediated. This requires new thinking, new structures, and new strategies to keep up, grow, and be profitable.

As the national debate on economic priorities and health care for all continues, industry insiders, policy experts, media pundits, and political partisans will stake out a diverse range of policy positions.

Regardless, payers and providers must be laser focused on consumer access to care, or consumers will look elsewhere. Once there’s a retention problem, retroactively trying to keep customers from leaving isn’t the answer.

In a new article, Lindsay R. Resnick breaks down four obstacles blocking access to care and offers suggested fixes for health care organizations to rethink, redesign, and improve patient experiences.

Read the full article here: Access Will Be Profitable — If Health Care Movers and Shakers Are Right

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President