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Fulfilling patients' needs and expectations for high-quality, coordinated care is vital to organizations' long-term prosperity in an era when patient retention matters more than ever.
Healthcare providers have always valued patient loyalty, but until recently their survival did not directly depend on it. Today, however, it has become a strategic imperative.
Whether patients returned for care did not much matter financially under health care's traditional fee-for-service system as long as there were other patients to take their places. Of course, hospitals and physicians have always known that their reputations influence their volume of referrals and thus their revenue. But if a practice had a long waiting list for appointments, or if a hospital's bed occupancy was high, no one worried if some patients decided to go elsewhere for care. Even today, most providers do not track the percentage of patients who voluntarily leave them each year.
In all likelihood, they will start doing that soon. We are entering an era in which provider organizations can no longer focus only on their volume of clinical activities. Rather, they must start to think about performance more broadly and strive to improve the value of the care they give. There is nothing fuzzy or idealistic about this notion. Increasingly, the combination of financial incentives under new payment models and the ongoing shift toward consumerism in health care should make value-defined as the relationship between the quality of care and the price paid for it-an overarching goal for providers. If they do not meet the needs of patients effectively and efficiently, providers will lose market share- and their viability will be threatened no matter how successful they have been at negotiating payment terms.
This long-term goal of improving value has suddenly become a more immediate priority as the Affordable Care Act broadens access to health care. For more and more Americans each year, insurance products provide incentives to obtain care from limited networks of providers. Not every patient is ready to choose providers solely on the basis of out-of-pocket costs, but many are pausing to question whether they need to stay with their current providers as they select insurance plans during annual open enrollments-particularly as data on quality of care become more available. The likely result of provider...