Creating Health Care Consumers

It’s a tune heard many times over: Patients need to become consumers, rather than just recipients, of health care. But what exactly does this mean? Driven by the rising cost of health care services, employers are adopting health benefit plans that give employees more control over spending health care dollars. Employers are hoping their workers will research their health care options as carefully as they do their furniture or car purchases.

In that regard, companies are offering many tools to make the price of health care more understandable. They may offer health savings accounts (HSAs) and try to educate employees about the true cost of health care. They may create elaborate wellness programs with the intent of changing unhealthy behaviors to benefit both the workers and the company’s bottom line. They might also offer regular health information through mailings or the company intranet.

Fortunately, overworked and understaffed human resources departments don’t have to do all of this alone. Many health care providers and insurers in the Twin Cities have established creative programs geared at educating patients about their own health care. Some choose to go through employers, while others market directly to their patients or members. Regardless of the method, the goals are often the same: Engage the patients, make the information accessible, and ask individuals to be accountable for their own health care.

Labeling Health Care

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota uses a readily recognizable consumer aid—the nutrition label—as a model for its consumer education program. Two years ago, the Eagan-based insurance provider launched www.healthcarefacts.org. It describes the services of 53 hospitals and more than 92 primary care clinics throughout Minnesota based on the information they voluntarily provide to Blue Cross.

Rather than relying on marketing executives and administrators to choose what information to present, Blue Cross conducted 90 focus groups with consumers to determine what mattered to them in health care. The first barrier the groups helped the Blue Cross team overcome was the language used in health care terms. For example, the organizers of the focus groups asked participants how complementary care ranked in their desired services from a hospital. Many thought that the question referred to free care or literally services delivered with compliments, rather than the term that the health care industry uses to describe alternative medicine.

“It helped us land on terminology that was clearer from the general consumer perspective than if it had been left to our own devices,” says MaryAnn Stump, Blue Cross’s senior vice president of strategic and consumer education. “We get used to our own vocabulary, and we don’t get that people don’t understand it the same way or isn’t meaningful to them. We wanted it to count from a consumer perspective.”