The gap between healthcare practitioners and health insurers jeopardizes patient care and outcomes, as we found in Forrester’s Healthcare Practitioners Survey, 2024. Most physicians we surveyed view health insurers as unsupportive and obstructive.

By contrast, a successful partnership between healthcare practitioners and health insurers ensures that patients understand the healthcare services they will receive and the potential costs involved. Patients are also more likely to experience high-quality, timely care backed by clinical intelligence. Health insurers must reduce friction in the practitioner experience by leading with transparency and improving interoperability. By providing clear information about treatment options and costs and ensuring seamless data sharing with practitioners, health insurers will build trust and improve accountability.

Forrester’s Healthcare Practitioners Survey: An Interactive Data Tool To Make Decisions

Forrester’s new interactive data summary of the Healthcare Practitioners Survey, 2024, helps healthcare leaders and organizations make better data-driven decisions. Clients can filter data on topics such as employee experience and benefits, daily workload and burnout, patient engagement, collaboration, technology and AI adoption, and more. Key findings include:

  • Practitioners overwhelmingly feel that insurers are a barrier to quality care. Over three-quarters of physicians agree that health insurers create additional hurdles to patients getting the care they need. They cite difficulties in working with insurers, communication issues, and challenges in patients finding providers. Less than one-fifth of clinicians find the claims submission and reimbursement process efficient and straightforward, underscoring the frustration with numerous barriers to productive collaboration.
  • Personnel shortages, burnout, and administrative burdens are top hurdles. Practitioners report that these issues delay treatments and hinder delivering optimal care. Of greatest concern: Only one-tenth of practitioners feel that they can deliver the best possible care.
  • Adequate support for interoperability and access to patient data is lacking. Less than one-quarter of healthcare practitioners agree that health insurers provide adequate support for interoperability and access to patient data. Those insurers that do so are half as likely to report delays in treatments due to administrative processes.

Forrester clients can view our full interactive data summary to gain insights into the current state of the employee experience among US healthcare practitioners. Schedule time with us now to dig deeper into the data.