From ‘built-to-bill’ to ‘built-to-care’: Healthcare Will Continue Moving Toward Personalized Care in 2023

That scene reminds me of how reluctant many large healthcare organizations have been to embrace new and better ways of doing things – despite overwhelming evidence that customer-obsession leads to better business performance. As this new year begins, many of these traditional large provider organizations in the U.S. still have their heads in the sand about the importance of personalizing the care experience for the individuals they serve. I don’t mean simply continuing to react to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) codes for reimbursement; I mean actually taking an intentional and proactive stance to bettering the consumer experience.

Too many traditional healthcare organizations are stuck in legacy “built-to-bill” processes and systems, and they can’t (or won’t) take a real whole-person personalized approach to care. Large integrated delivery networks (IDNs) have invested too much in yesterday and not nearly enough in tomorrow.

The good news is the outmoded business model that results in the dehumanization of people (just be “patient”) – a model in which ambulatory care services are inappropriately and inconveniently bundled with acute care services into a big IDN – is starting to unravel as more healthcare organizations migrate toward value-based care (VBC) models that emphasize improving outcomes and experience. “Built-to-bill” is being replaced by “built-to-care.”

Here are some of thoughts on how things could and should play out in the new year:

Consumer-centricity will drive transformation

Emerging competitors that see exactly what healthcare consumers want and where healthcare inevitably must go – toward consumer-centricity – will transform the market.

That was Amazon’s goal when it purchased primary care company One Medical, vowing to “reinvent” healthcare. It’s why CVS Health acquired Signify Health. And it’s why Walgreens Boots Alliance is buying Summit Health. Those are just three deals that were struck in the second half of 2022, and they were all done at multiples of revenue. These are customer-obsessed retail organizations that aim to leap ahead of the slowly transforming large legacy providers.

This trend will accelerate in 2023. These deals and others like them in ambulatory care offer a peek at a future where ambulatory care (where so much of the customer experience lies) is sensibly separated from acute care. Retailers and big tech companies, both of which know how to treat consumers, are going to continue pushing the rest of the industry to adopt truly person-centered care models. The paths Dedalus has forged over the last 40 years in global healthcare IT has helped us to realize that this is where we want to spend our time in North America. Our aim is to personalize care for everybody, everywhere.

More collaboration from tech partners

Technology companies partnering with healthcare organizations to transform how care is delivered will need to be much more collaborative and less focused on disruption as a sole objective.

For Dedalus, that means finding a few good customers and partners that want to play the long game while keeping our eye on the ball of consumer experience. Sustained collaboration at scale (with a few good partners and a few good customers) is going to be a real theme this year and in years to come.

Providers will have to stop telling people to ‘be patient’

Granted, this is more of a wish than a prediction, but one practice I hope to see fade away in 2023 is providers continuing to tell people to just be patient. It’s dehumanizing language and we should find other ways to engage.

Not a prediction, a promise

Here’s one thing you can count on in 2023: The Dedalus team will be fun to engage with because we’re going to challenge everything we do every day from the experience of the consumers of care and the care team members (licensed and otherwise) serving them. And we’re going to challenge the healthcare organizations that we are fortunate enough to partner with in the same way, to focus on the long game.

So…who’s coming with us?