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People who would prefer not to participate in their own healthcare decisions are 20% more likely than engaged consumers to be living with a chronic condition.
When offered, only 60% of employees have ever used any of the tools in their employer's benefits portal.
Two-thirds of benefits portal users go online daily.
Less than 1% of online Europeans have purchased prescription drugs online, compared with 10% of US consumers.
Sixty-one percent of online drug purchasers want to compare drugs more easily online.
Nearly a third of consumers profess healthcare cost-consciousness, making them candidates for consumer-directed health plans.
Eric Brown will be speaking at GigaWorld IT Forum 2004 in Orlando, Fla., May 17-20. This year's GigaWorld, Forrester's flagship Event, will focus on "Creating Business Value With IT."
Liz Boehm will be speaking at the World Congress on Pharmaceutical Marketing on May 27 in Philadelphia.
X Internet Boosts Medical Device Profits by Navi Radjou
Three Tools For Direct HIPAA Connections by Eric Brown
Healthcare Consumerism's Second Act by Brad Holmes
drugstore.com Taps Employee Benefits by Liz Boehm
athenahealth: BPO For Doctors by Eric Brown
Benefits Portals Don't Deliver On Their Potential
by Brad Holmes
Can RFID Help Solve Pharma's Drug Distribution Problem? by Josh Walker
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To reap CDHP returns, plans should engage older, sicker healthcare consumers
Consumerism -- the desire to make informed purchase decisions -- is just beginning to take hold in the realm of healthcare. Only one-third of consumers we surveyed are currently willing to use their health benefits more sparingly in exchange for a portion of the savings. Those who have adopted the healthcare consumerist mindset are comparatively more affluent, better educated, more tech savvy, and healthier than their disengaged counterparts. To reach the more healthcare resource-intensive population of older and sicker consumers and reap the cost-control benefits that consumer-directed plans promise, payers should use plain language and user-friendly sites to communicate more information to healthcare consumers. To play a more active role in their healthcare decisions, consumers need more side-by-side comparison information about pharmaceutical products, and provider statistics like patient satisfaction, outcomes, and complication rates.
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Consumers benefit from ease of using FSA dollars at drugstore.com
In addition to its thriving business in prescriptions and retail health and beauty aids, drugstore.com has implemented benefits transactions that simplify consumers' use of flexible spending account (FSA) dollars for OTC products. drugstore.com has created an FSA store for eligible products, and added an FSA icon to alert customers to product eligibility as they browse. Evolution Benefits members can even use their direct-debit FSA MasterCard right at checkout to avoid any out-of-pocket payment for FSA-eligible OTC purchases. Others can print a separate itemized receipt of all their FSA-eligible OTC purchases. Automated FSA reimbursement will promote switching to OTC, support CDHP members' product comparisons, and help plans without PBM capabilities in-house compete for Medicare card business.
Transaction fees will fall as plans connect to small practices
Direct connections between healthcare payers and providers will slim down transaction fees and cut clearinghouses out of the loop. Small physician practices without much IT know-how remain a challenging next frontier for the biz vendors that link doctors to plans. But Post-N-Track, CorePolicy, and Ivertex have developed three technology strategies for meeting the needs of small group practices. Direct connections will drop transaction fees below a dime and promote the proliferation of payer-sponsored Web interfaces for claims submissions.
We are very interested in your feedback on our research. Do you have topics to recommend, data you would like to have, or technologies you want assessed? Drop me a line with your input at bradholmes@forrester.com.
Brad Holmes
VP and Research Director, Healthcare & Life Sciences
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