Shor t Takes
Stone: Fundamentally driving for greater efficiency and
lower administrative costs in any capacity in healthcare
is critical regardless of what happens moving forward.
Whether you’re a hospital system or a payer, a focus
on improving your value proposition to consumers and
individuals being better at differentiating your service
offering, the value you deliver, those will all be critical
components of standing out in a future market. People
will be voting more with their feet. There will be more
transparency eventually, and having higher quality rat-
ings and consumer satisfaction will be unquestionably
important where people like you and I wind up spend-
ing more of our own dollars and have more information
available for choosing doctors.
Consulting: What are some of the biggest consulting
opportunities or challenges clients will face in
this climate?
Stone: Where to focus. And some of it is daunting.
One of the things we have today I call the “throw-
ing spaghetti against the wall” phenomenon. There
are lots of tools, apps, services, coaches, resources
etc., but rather than configuring them and creating
perfect-built solutions for different segments of con-
sumers and making it easy to know what you’re go-
ing to get and meet expectations every time, most
of what’s available in the market is we throw it all
against the wall and it’s a little bit like “I have stuff
for everybody!” But the burden is all on the consum-
er to connect the dots. The biggest opportunities lie
in helping people understand where are the areas you
can differentiate on for what type of target custom-
ers where they’ll actually choose to pay a premium
or select X over Y. Part of it will be taking a whole
bunch of stuff that healthcare is already invested in
and making it work together and smarter. There are
a lot of tools out there that plans and systems have
spent a lot of money on, but they aren’t wired to-
gether in a way that feels seamless to the consumer.
Healthcare needs to do a couple of things. It needs
to continue to put a focus on quality of care and cost
and work on making the consumer experience sim-
pler and easier, and less of a burden for the consumer
to connect all the dots. Right now there are lots of
tools and options, but they all feel fragmented and
piecemeal, and so a lot of the consulting will be in
connecting those pieces together.
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From a consulting standpoint,
we may not move forward until
there’s more clarity. There could
be a freezing in the marketplace
because of uncertainty.
