The jobs healthcare is hired to perform: Part I–A different starting point
I was discussing disruption and marketing with a friend of mine. As is sometimes the case, when one’s friends lean toward academic & entrepreneurial types, we started talking about innovation. Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive change came up, and reminded me of a simple truth: Customers look to satisfy needs.
Customers want to “hire” a product to do a job, or, as legendary Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt put it, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”
It strikes me that one of the core issues with the health system today is that we focus on systematic, top-down costs combined with delivery and payment asymmetry. We have fragmented networks of providers looking to maximize reimbursement. We have payors ranging from government to employers to insurance companies. We have lost track of why people are paying for medical care to begin with–or we are shortchanging the other expenditures that serve the same “jobs” as health.
So lets step back and think about what jobs people are “hiring” health practitioners and products to do. In many cases, this has nothing to do with wonky goals like “universal coverage”, “quality ratings”, or “cost-efficient care”. Most people care not about cholesterol or C-reactive protein or PSA levels until the heart attack or cancer words spring up. So what are people looking for when they go to the healthcare system for help?
Some pleas from my days on the wards and clinic come to mind for me:
- Make it stop hurting/ help me feel better
- I want to live
- I don’t want to lose my (loved one)
- I want to be able to _______ again
- I need to do __________ for ____________
- I want to improve my chances with ____________
- I need more time to be remembered as ___________
However, I know these are biased to a hospital/ acute care setting. And the jobs proposed by insurance companies and employers for health providers differ radically as well. Over the next few weeks, I’m hoping an exploration of the “jobs” each faction hires health providers to perform makes some of the checks and balances of the system a little clearer.
But I’d love to hear from you as well–what “jobs” do people hire healthcare to perform– and how can those be done better?
