The Patient's Manifesto

We patients are the ultimate headache customer. We are crabby or scared from the start of our healthcare encounter until the end. We remember the one thing that went wrong and quickly forget the other hundreds of steps that went according to a masterfully planned experience.

We healthcare consumers expect our physicians to be master scientists with the heart of a Peace Corps director. We want an Ivy League diploma on the wall of every doctor we have. We expect our nurses to be a walking repository of our symptoms and preferences.

We don't engage with the healthcare system like you hospitals and physicians want us to for a lot of reasons. We should find a “medical home” but all the PCPs in our market are not taking patients, so we end up going wherever we can when we get sick. It costs us $50 every time, too, which is not easy considering the premium increases are more than the last raise.

We are scared we will lose our coverage, either because of a job loss or because we will get some chronic condition that will make future coverage almost impossible to obtain. So we stay away. And we don't like being led by our health plan to explore our options because we think they benefit more than we do.

We hate the hospital before we even get there. The disinfectant atmosphere hits us from the parking lot. No matter how cheery the admission staff or nurses try to be, misery still pours out of the place if patients are stacked around. We can tell the difference between caring clinicians and pretenders. We want food like we cook it at home. We want our dignity. We want to go home the minute the doctor says we can.

If 64-slice CTs are good then 128 is better. We want the same hip implant that Jack Nicklaus got even if it costs more. We want an easy source for follow-up care. If we develop an infection or some other scary symptom we will unapologetically make your office staff miserable. We don't want multiple bills for the same encounter. If we have a billing problem we don't expect to spend months managing it.

We will not abide being preached to about our health. We want our healthcare data when we need it because it is ours. We have to use e-mail and social media in the modern world and we expect doctors to join us.

We want control of our healthcare decisions but we don't want to do all the work.

In short, we want healthcare to engage us—on our terms, not the other way around.

Jim Molpus
Editor
jmolpus@healthleadersmedia.com