Creating Health Care Consumers

The jargon lesson was just one of the learning experiences Blue Cross took from these groups, Stump says. The groups indicated that getting references from other patients, nurse-to-patient ratio, and the percentage of private rooms were all important considerations for them in choosing hospitals. “A lot of the things that rated high were based on the relationship between the health care system and the patients,” Stump says. “We’ve put a lot of emphasis on technology, and we’ve lost track of the fact that health care is a relationship business.”

The focus group results led to the nutrition label format. Each Blue Cross facility is “labeled” with information about its accessibility (i.e., whether there’s a pharmacy on site, parking information, the availability of same-day appointments), safety and quality (such as patient references), and available services and technology. The label is only one page long on the Healthcare Facts Web site, so consumers don’t have to scroll through pages and pages of information to arrive at what’s valuable to them. Consumers can search on criteria such as price range, number of births, heart attacks treated, and availability of pain management programs in hospitals and no-charge “get acquainted” visits, 24-hour nurse lines, and online appointment scheduling in primary care clinics. The information is updated every six months.

Stump hopes that patients, who do not need to be Blue Cross members to take advantage of Healthcare Facts, will become better health care consumers through programs such as this one. “Consumers have said, ‘I wouldn’t buy a car just on price; I want to know more than that,’” she says. “It really is a value equation. It’s intuitive.”

Comparing Educational Strategies

Although it’s common for health insurance providers to filter health care information to individuals through employers, hospital and clinic networks are starting to tread those waters, too. Park Nicollet, based in St. Louis Park, received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control to test the concept of teaching smart shopping for health care at work sites. Park Nicollet chose two workplaces with a range of employee types (i.e., from administrative to professional) for the three-year study, which compares two approaches to health education—one that focuses on educating consumers about the health care system (called “consumer messaging), and another that teaches the more conventional behavioral health-improvement strategies.

“In a traditional lifestyle intervention, the focus is typically around lifestyle behaviors, like eating better to maintain healthy weight, managing diabetes better, or managing your stress. A behavior has definite impact on the pathology of a condition,” says Lisa Harvey, director of health education at Park Nicollet. “With consumer messaging, it’s not so much about how to eat better. It’s more about how can they use the health care system better, how can they find those resources to be able to make those improvements they want, how can they talk to their physician so that he or she can help them find the tools they need.”