Has COVID-19 Permanently Pushed Open Hospitals' Digital Front Doors?

摘要

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic began to upend all facets of the healthcare ecosystem, many organizations were thinking about how they could become more consumer-centric, while subsequently deploying strategies to do so. Granted, consumerism in healthcare is still very much an emerging concept, but forward-thinking hospitals and health systems have been ramping-up efforts in this area. For a patient care organization, what does it mean to be consumer-centric? A good person to ask would be Kevan Mabbutt, who is the senior vice president and chief consumer officer at Intermountain Healthcare, a 24-hospital health system based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Mabbutt, who joined Intermountain three years ago from Disney, says the words consumer and consumerism are relatively new to healthcare, and not always well understood or accepted. "But the idea is very simple," he asserts. "We all consume products and services in our everyday lives, and we all have needs and expectations of those products and services. Healthcare should not be any different, and yet it has been. We have the same consumers as hospitality, retail, big tech, entertainment, travel and other industries, and yet we do not provide a comparable experience."