From Michael Howe, former MinuteClinic CEO, in this 4/20/10 blog post: The Intersection of Retail and Health Care.
Howe is strongest on the essential organizing principle of the disruptive innovation that is retail clinics, and the merits of fresh leadership from outside the healthcare industry:
“what may be novel to health care companies is their need to take the service principles from consumer-focused organizations — managing customers’ expectations and experiences, for instance, and conducting consumer research — and apply them to their operations. “
Established health care leaders must look outside the industry to understand how to adapt to this new reality.
However, his corporate-y recap of retail clinics present & future does strike some off-notes. For example, ” WebMD, DestinationRx, and other online resources” have hardly “created” “informed, intelligent and engaged” consumers – though they certainly supported the take-charge efforts of many who fit that description. Procter & Gamble attorneys are almost certainly cringing at Howe’s brisk assertion that P&G “will begin providing health care services” via its MD VIP concierge network; to the ears of attorneys general in most if not all jurisdictions that would sound quite like the corporate provision of health care, something off-limits in most places.
Further, while they certainly enjoy ease & convenience of routine non-emergency care when they need it, with little or no delay, most people are not as sanguine as Mr. Howe imagines about the notion that retail clinics might be “taking over many of the traditional tasks of the private physician’s practice”, in ways “requiring far less direct interaction with physicians”.
Finally, few physicians are likely to cheer Howe’s insinuation that they have been making like motor-vehicle clerks, and simply “must become educators, coaches and advisers who cater their services to the unique circumstances and demands of individual patients”, as if there have not been barriers other than retail enlightenment to keep them from performing their roles more in keeping with their abilities and training.
There’s lots to cheer in the emerging shape of retail health services, and Howe’s leadership has been indispensible to the success not only of MinuteClinic’s particular approach but to the early successes of the industry overall. We’d just underscore that the book on retail clinics not only hasn’t been completed; – the introduction is still in draft stage.
While we’re thumbing through HBR, though, we should note that “Megatrend” #8 in the Review’s Megatrends in Global Health Care (published 4/21(?)/10) is “Non-MDs Providing Care“
6
Jul 10
Health Care as Information Care: View From The Street
Sure, plenty of articles, news blurbs, tweets, and other stuff has been issued about personal health records (I’m blazing a new trail: The Term Doesn’t Need Capitalizing Anymore. You read it here first), but few really acknowledge the primacy of information care in the realm of routine primary care the way this recent Chicago Sun-Times article does:
Health Records In A Snap (7/3/10, immediate access – no registration/subscription required).
We’re not sure reporter Sandra Guy identifies the potential alternative futures perfectly, but she does a more than respectable job:
There’s plenty of room for alternatives between these rather stark choices, and we would have liked to see some of those referenced in this general interest piece. But that’s exactly what enthuses us about this article – it’s a general interest piece that frames the connection between “better” primary care and “better” means of communicating about that care more lucidly than most of its kind.