Insights
A recent CB Insights Research report, “Amazon in Healthcare: The E-Commerce Giant’s Strategy for a $3 Trillion Market” 1, attracted my attention for a number of reasons but none more than the following statement:
Customer experience has been an afterthought in almost every part of healthcare, and is reflected in the poor NPS scores (related to customer satisfaction) across the board”.
Wow! If you have any involvement or interest in the healthcare market and that doesn’t get your attention, I’m not sure what does. The article mentions how Amazon, which is obsessively focused on the consumers’ experience, might just develop and deliver a consumer-centric strategy for healthcare. The report even mentions how “customer love” plays an important part of their non-traditional business model.
The report also provides interesting elements of strategic direction with words like “obsessively focused on consumer experience”, “partnerships”, “large healthcare ecosystem” and to me, the most interesting “ free from profit-making incentives and constraints” as they “are not dependent on making a profit in healthcare”. Not making a profit! That is a definite shot across the bow to the healthcare vendor community.
I cannot comment on the possible success of Amazon’s healthcare strategy as described in this report, but it does send significant warning signs for those within the healthcare vendor community. Those vendors who continue to focus on traditional business practices, which might have delivered success in the past, are now observing disquieting signs of organizational issues and concerns.
The potential outcome of the Amazon healthcare strategy, as described in the CB Insight report, is compelling, disruptive and appropriately focused on the consumers of healthcare. This should have great appeal to providers and payors of healthcare as they continuously strive to improve their effectiveness and efficiencies in a patient-centric model. It would also deliver to the vision of Value-Based Healthcare (VBH) and introduce the concept of Net Promoter Scoring (NPS) to the patient/consumer experience and outcome.
The vision of VBH is to deliver measureable and timely value to the patient’s outcome per dollar spent. NPS is a straightforward metric for measuring the loyalty of the customer/consumer and is utilized in many successful organizations. NPS can and is already used by some healthcare providers, payors and vendors. For those who apply the discipline of NPS, kudos. For those who have embraced and apply both VBH + NPS, congratulations!
The vendor opportunity of developing and delivering to the VBH + NPS model is significant from a market branding, positioning and value differentiation. It obliges vendors to not only understand the required clinical and business case of their clients (provider and payor communities), but also to get a better understanding of how their products, services or solutions ultimately improve the patient’s outcome for the dollars invested. Put in a different way, vendors now need to better understand and continuously measure, either directly or indirectly, the customers (patient/consumer) of their clients (healthcare providers and payors) healthcare experience.
For those healthcare vendors that want to profitably grow their business in the short and long-term, they must go beyond the allure of impressive technology and collaborate with providers and payors to deliver, measure and continuously improve their value proposition to the required return-on-value in a patient-centric approach. The VBH + NPS model provides the measureable discipline and timely response to required actions and unmet needs in a market of dynamic adaptation.
And for those within the healthcare vendor community who will continue to ride out the storm of transition and transformation, can I suggest that you Google “Professional Resume Writers”?
1 https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/amazon-transforming- healthcare/?utm_source=CB+Insights+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9eacaf05df-Top_Research_Briefs_09_08_2018&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9dc0513989-9eacaf05df-90580130
About the Author(s)
Ron Kaczorowski is the Managing Director of Mareka Alliances, the President of Securlinx (IBO) and the former Chair of the Kensington Health Centre. He can be reached at ronkaczorowski@sympatico.ca
Comments
Karen Belaire wrote:
Posted 2019/08/01 at 11:59 AM EDT
This is certainly a wake up call for healthcare providers.
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