Conversations That Cut the Medical Bill (Jim Karrh On Marketing)

Considering all of the technical advances and new complexities in marketing today (such as social, digital and automation), I see the major opportunity for most organizations to be a decidedly analog one. Customer conversations — those interactions in real time, generally face to face — are ripe for improving engagement, service levels, loyalty and growth. A remarkable new study of the conversations between doctors and patients also shows that more proactive face-to-face interactions can even lower costs. The study comes from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, the Duke University School of Medicine and several other institutions. The research team studied actual recorded dialogue from 1,755 outpatient visits that occurred between 2010 and 2014. The patients were dealing with breast cancer, depression or rheumatoid arthritis — all conditions with potentially high out-of-pocket costs. The conversations involved 56 oncologists, 36 psychiatrists and 26 rheumatologists. The researchers wanted to learn how often cost came up in the conversation, who brought it up and what the results were. Among the findings: Cost was part of the doctor-patient conversation 30 percent of the time. This was an increase from studies conducted several years before. Doctors were just as likely to bring up the topic of cost as their patients were. The cost component of the conversation usually lasted one minute or less. In nearly half of those times when cost was discus...
Source: Arkansas Business - Health Care - Category: American Health Source Type: news