Retail Disruptors Stealing Your Customers? Time to Disrupt Back
// By Jane Weber Brubaker //
See those retailers in your rearview mirror? They are the health care disruptors you’ve been hearing about — Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, Amazon, Google — and they are coming for you. They are closer than they appear, and they will steal your customers — if you don’t disrupt back.
Gary Druckenmiller, senior vice president, strategy and innovation, Healthgrades
“The retailers have already nailed positive customer experiences,” says Gary Druckenmiller, senior vice president, strategy and innovation at Healthgrades. “They do it better than anybody in the world.”
Druckenmiller and co-presenter Jeff Bean, vice president, system marketing and brand at Geisinger, made the case for why health care providers need to accelerate innovation and become “commerce ready” during their presentation at the 2020 HMPS Virtual Summit in August.
“Commerce ready” means that in the not-too-distant future you may shop for health care services just as you shop for anything else online: selecting what you want to purchase, adding it to your shopping cart, and when you’re finished shopping, checking out.
Jeff Bean, vice president, system marketing and brand, Geisinger
Is that really possible? And more important, is that what customers really want? Geisinger thinks so. The Pennsylvania-based health system has built a reputation around thinking of patients as customers and adopting commerce-like concepts not usually seen in health care organizations, like giving refunds to dissatisfied customers. But that’s only the beginning. Bean and Druckenmiller shared their vision for how health care providers should think, and what a hospital’s shopping cart could look like.