Losing Touch: How Can You Reconnect with Today’s Mobile Healthcare Consumer?

We are experiencing a crisis of confidence in healthcare. There’s no other way to diagnose our current condition. Employers are increasingly frustrated with the amount of waste in their benefit offerings, despite employee demands for increased perks and support. Payors are grappling with how to more consistently engage their members in high-value clinical services such as maternity programs that encourage healthy pregnancies. Providers continually struggle to establish loyal relationships with patients and instead are relegated to delivering transactional care. Meanwhile, consumers are choosing to go it alone, getting lost amidst a sea of solutions that aren’t necessarily supported by their employer, health plan or doctor. Why? Because despite a lot of discussion and innovation and new tools, the healthcare system is still fractured. It’s complicated. And it doesn’t accommodate timely support.

As a result, consumers are opting out and taking matters into their own hands. Healthcare costs continue to spiral. Employee engagement and productivity continue to lag. High-risk pregnancies consistently make the top-10 cost drivers for employer healthcare costs. Shockingly, as maternal mortality fell by almost half in developing countries between 1990 and 2015, it doubled in the United States. There has to be a better way.

MOBILE TO THE RESCUE?

We live in a mobile economy. Instacart drops your groceries at your doorstep. Filld will make sure you always have a full tank of gas. Amazon will take care of almost everything else. Even dog grooming and dog walking is a “mobile” business now. If you want to engage with a modern-day consumer, you have to go to them, because everything is on-demand and one click away, driven by a smart phone. In this new reality, consumers are being relentlessly bombarded by unvetted mobile solutions that aren’t connected to the healthcare system.

The same individuals that have lost faith and are generally confused, now have hundreds of options that deliver varying levels of quality and continuity. Which leads to questions of how to choose and who to trust. This is a big business. To demonstrate how big a business this is, consider a recent research brief that predicted the global mHealth market will reach $118 billion by the year 2025. As a result of this explosive growth of options, employers, payors and providers are rapidly losing the ability to engage consumers and proactively assist them in making healthy decisions. 

How do we turn this tide? It’s time to reconnect. Are you ready to leverage mobile technologies to engage your population, or will you continue to lose touch with the people you serve? To dig deeper into this topic and access a roadmap for reconnecting via mobile technology, download our ebook: Losing Touch: Reconnecting with Today’s Mobile Healthcare Consumer. In Losing Touch, we break down best practices in mobile health to help you establish trust and relevancy with today's tech-savvy healthcare consumer.