What jam teaches us about healthcare

Researchers at Columbia and Stanford were probably hungry and definitely inventive when, some years ago, they came up with a study to find out whether more choice is a bad thing. They looked at two groups of consumer reactions to Wilkin & Sons jams.?

This brand’s flavors are deliciously wide-ranging and the more you try the more you want to try. Apricot with Armagnac, anyone? But when one group tasted 6 jams and the other 24, it was actually the group that tasted fewer jams which bought more jam afterwards. Ten times more.?

Too much choice is not only demotivating (do you really need No Peel Marmalade?). It can be disappointing. Discussing their results, the researchers asked, “How can there be so much dissatisfaction in the face of so much opportunity?” It’s a fair question for healthcare, too.?

In our surprisingly jam-like industry, choice overload leads people to become overwhelmed, dissatisfied, or both. This is one of the main things we can smooth with integration, alongside alignment of company goals with patient goals. What does this look like?

An integrated healthcare offering replaces chance with choice so, instead of presenting the patient with a?haphazard series of decisions, you give them the right options at the right time. This way, whether the issue is acute or chronic, physical or behavioral, in-person or virtual, medical or administrative, people spend less time within the system racking up expense. They solve what they need to solve.

That's how alignment starts. It continues when a healthcare company does whatever it needs to do to get an answer for a patient. If it doesn’t have the right care option in-house, it works to find it wherever possible, including externally. Instead of self-referring for the sake of it, the company insists on asking: what’s the best product or service for this person’s stated, and unstated, needs, and what are the offerings and resources available to them??

Throughout, the focus of the healthcare company remains on outcomes, because that’s where a patient’s focus is. Here’s where metrics and measurement come in, helping align the interests of an industry with the people it serves. The best healthcare companies want provable progress in the same direction as members and clients.

They look to measures like Healthy Days, an overall outcomes metric which asks the question: During the past month, how many days did your health interrupt your work or personal life? Early data suggests for every healthy day gained in a month there’s a significant increase in savings and decrease in overall use of healthcare. Data also suggests that people who report fewer than 15 healthy days in a month spend twice as much on healthcare in the subsequent six months.?

Alignment can be formal or intuitive. Either is good. Our company’s business model is purposefully designed not to conflict with the interests of our members and our clients (employers and health plans). Instead, it directly aligns with them. We provide an integrated offering, find people the best product or service wherever we can, and measure progress using metrics ranging from appropriate vs inappropriate emergency room use to PHQ9 and GAD scores to cost savings .?

There is always more to be done, to keep our goals and the goals of our members and clients in sync. But we never forget that we succeed when we drive superior outcomes and reduced costs for them. More alignment means better choices, and results, for us all.