Building your healthcare brand

Somewhere among US-based healthcare companies, a brand leader stands ready to make healthcare simple. No more Chinese menus of choices...too much choice paralyzes. No more convoluted, cross-purpose processes to get and pay for services...consumer-directed healthcare should excise these. And most of all, no more unregulated providers...transparency breeds service quality standards and consumer confidence.

If consumers are truly meant to direct their own healthcare needs, industry must reform itself. Until somebody seizes this opportunity to lead the way, to address consumer needs and proactively track and manage risk, confusion and the status quo will prevail.

How can your visionary company break from the herd, set industry on its ear, and assert the title "brand leader?" As a simplification expert who has helped clients build equity through improved brand execution and customer experiences, I offer my prescription not just for a better system, but also for becoming an industry leader in this brave new consumer-directed world.

1. Create an internal body of experts, consumer advocates, marketers, and legal and compliance officers to review operations and critical points of consumer interaction and propose cost-efficient ways to improve brand performance.
2. Define and promote consistent, simple terms for healthcare services and benefits to improve comparability and create informed consumers.
3. Cull the options in Medicare Part D. This is a work in progress since the program just launched, but the timing is right.
4. Apply non-industry expertise to help solve the billing, terminology, and process challenges while shortening the time and ideally, reducing the expense of change.
5. Put customers first. Too many healthcare professionals are in the position of determining who pays whom before agreeing to provide services. Worse yet, consumers are all too often left to sort out financial responsibility because medical services and payment schemes are neither transparent nor intuitive.

Lastly, if a company can focus on one thing only, it should work to make consumer-directed healthcare simple, understandable and predictable to consumers. Imagine if yours is the company that cracks this nut first. What would that say about your brand? Better yet, what would you be saying about yourself?

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