I came across a white paper from Healthwise, "It’s a Jungle Out There: How Information Therapy Can Tame the Forces of Pay for Performance and Consumer-Directed Care by Healthwise and it focuses on improving patient education. There are a couple of concepts that I found interesting.
1.The paper reviews the concept of "managed consumerism," which looks to be the driving force of health care economics in the coming decade and calls for:
- Using provider incentives, like P4P, to control the cost and quality of provider-induced demand.
- Using cnsumer incentives, like a health savings account, to control the cost and appropriateness of consumer-sensitive demand.
They point out that the financial incentives to hospitals are only part of the motivation and that no hospital wants the public to see its quality ranking fall below average on any measure.
2. The paper introduces information therapy as a new tool for patient education and it involves three components:
- information triggers with predict the patient's moment in care.
- the patient's moment in care defines the questions and decisions that the patient is likely to face
- the information prescription delivers targeted and tailored messaging and content to help answer the questions and support the decisions.
What came to my mind when I read this was Similac - the baby formula. Back when I was a new mom I signed up with them to receive information relevant to my condition (pregnancy). Periodically I would receive things in the mail educating me about caring for myself and a newborn. Then when we neared the time when the baby was due I received lots of coupons (for Similac) and more information. I continued to receive coupons and information until the point when my child(ren) was/were no longer on formula.
I always found it interesting that they knew just what to send me and when, although I knew I had shared my due date and they could figure it out from there. Also, as I used the coupons they knew to send me more to keep me loyal. And, this is information therapy in my mind!
What is information therapy in your mind? How do you see it working with P4P and consumer-directed healthcare?
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