back to index#AIS: The Lanby's Tandice Urban on solving healthcare's customer service problem
Chapters
0:0 The Lanby's Tandice Urban breaks down why healthcare has a customer service problem, and how to fix it
12:28 Bestie Q&A: changing American's perspective on healthcare, opportunity for DTC health brands, why is medical spend at all-time highs while avg lifespan has flatlined/slightly decreased?
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We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. 00:00:26.480 |
So what I want to talk about today is the problem that I'm obsessed with, 00:00:31.140 |
which is bad customer service and healthcare. 00:00:33.560 |
So I'd like to start out by walking you through a day at the doctor's office. 00:00:40.980 |
You have to start out by making an appointment. 00:00:44.640 |
You talk to someone very unpleasant on the phone. 00:00:53.520 |
You go back and forth a little bit on your calendars. 00:01:04.040 |
Someone very unpleasant checks you in at the front desk. 00:01:23.280 |
As you may have guessed, they're very unpleasant. 00:01:28.220 |
It's very small, blab, fluorescent lighting everywhere. 00:01:32.240 |
They hand you essentially a sheet of printer paper. 00:01:35.600 |
Now you're in sort of a secondary holding chamber. 00:01:39.260 |
Except this time you can hear the doctor in the other room. 00:01:42.800 |
And they're saying, "Hey, it's so great to see you." 00:01:44.500 |
And so you know they're just getting started in there, 00:01:47.000 |
even though your appointment was an hour ago at this point. 00:01:52.500 |
You start to go through your little question list. 00:01:55.880 |
Get up the courage to ask everything you came in to ask. 00:02:07.840 |
You're maybe like eight minutes into the appointment at this point. 00:02:10.880 |
And you're like, "Okay, also I have some questions." 00:02:12.700 |
And you pull up your little question list on your phone. 00:02:15.040 |
And you get through maybe like two or three of these questions. 00:02:18.520 |
And then the doctor starts to give you a look like, "Let's wrap this up." 00:02:27.840 |
If you're lucky, they'll tell you how much you owe. 00:02:29.840 |
If not, you will just find out later in the mail. 00:02:32.840 |
So my guess is that maybe many of you in this audience have a concierge doctor. 00:02:38.640 |
But most of us have had some iteration of this experience at some point. 00:02:43.240 |
There are a lot of terrible things about our healthcare system. 00:02:45.320 |
But the one I want to complain about specifically today is why the customer service at the point 00:02:50.100 |
at which you're actually consuming the healthcare is so appallingly bad. 00:02:55.800 |
that's anything that touches the patient experience while you're going to the doctor. 00:03:00.440 |
So a long wait time is as much bad customer service as the unfriendly front desk person. 00:03:07.560 |
There's this really great quote that I love from Bill Gurley, prolific investor, and my 00:03:20.800 |
The US healthcare market is the least customer centric of any customer service industry. 00:03:25.760 |
We are so numb to the pain that we rarely object or complain. 00:03:29.760 |
So that's part of what I think is so crazy about this is that we kind of just take it. 00:03:35.660 |
And so that got me curious to explore three questions that I want to go through with you 00:03:44.040 |
Number two, why should we care that things are so bad? 00:03:48.760 |
What's a little something we can do to make it better? 00:03:55.720 |
Our customer service problem is really more of a consumer service problem. 00:04:00.540 |
And what I mean by that is patients are consuming the healthcare, but they're not exactly the 00:04:04.520 |
customer in the traditional free market sense of the term. 00:04:07.600 |
So who is the US healthcare system as we know is an employer sponsored model. 00:04:14.480 |
It's more of a World War Two relic that was came from a national mandated wage freeze 00:04:22.080 |
And now today, the doctor is not getting out of bed in the morning for your $15 copay. 00:04:25.680 |
They're really making their money off of the major stakeholders in the industry who are 00:04:37.080 |
By the way, there's major burnout in the medical community. 00:04:40.040 |
But when you play this all the way out, you're left with misaligned incentives between physicians 00:04:46.800 |
Physicians in the traditional fee for service model, which is our predominant model today 00:04:50.060 |
where physicians are paid per per patient encounter, they're incentivized by volume. 00:04:55.640 |
And not by quality and not by good health outcomes. 00:04:58.200 |
So it's no surprise that practices are not designed to cater to the patient. 00:05:02.940 |
And once that becomes the norm, it becomes the culture, every doctor's office can get 00:05:06.920 |
And now you're left with these two really bad stats. 00:05:10.240 |
The first one is in primary care, specifically, the average NPS for provider is three. 00:05:20.480 |
Number two, 96% of patient complaints are about the service itself, only 4% are about 00:05:26.560 |
So patients are really noticing how bad the customer service is. 00:05:30.860 |
And yet, to go back to our earlier point, patients have this sort of Stockholm syndrome 00:05:35.940 |
when it comes to going to the doctor specifically. 00:05:38.060 |
We'll request a non-talkative Uber because we don't feel like chatting with the driver 00:05:41.380 |
or we'll leave a very scathing Yelp review for a restaurant. 00:05:44.840 |
But when it comes to this service, even though we're not an easy to please generation, we 00:05:51.040 |
And it's the most important service across any service industry. 00:05:56.640 |
And why should we care that we're having such a bad time at the doctor's office? 00:06:01.320 |
It's because bad service is bad for our health. 00:06:05.360 |
So good medicine is a partnership between a patient who's coming in with real information 00:06:09.880 |
on how they're feeling and then a physician who's coming in with real expertise to bring 00:06:16.020 |
But if the patient is feeling very anxious and exhausted and the doctor is feeling very 00:06:19.740 |
rushed and dismissive, you're left with losing a bunch of really important information 00:06:25.520 |
that you need to make nuanced diagnostic and treatment plans. 00:06:29.040 |
So to give you an example, doctors are far more likely to prescribe antibiotics in the 00:06:32.920 |
afternoon than they are in the morning for the same patient with the same issues because 00:06:37.820 |
they're just running late and they're dealing with decision fatigue. 00:06:40.020 |
If you leave with anything from this talk, it should be to make morning appointments. 00:06:45.340 |
And then patients, on the other hand, know all of this and they've felt this before. 00:06:49.400 |
And so what many of them end up doing is deferring treatment altogether. 00:06:57.820 |
Health care has a patient buy-in problem because they've made the experience of going to the 00:07:02.680 |
doctor's office so bad that we only go when we absolutely have to go. 00:07:07.340 |
And what do we lose when we go when we only absolutely have to go? 00:07:12.660 |
And preventive care is really the reason it's so bad that we're not going to the doctor's 00:07:19.720 |
We lose out on all the upstream, life-saving, cost-saving benefits of prevention. 00:07:25.440 |
So I'm going to hit you with three stats on that. 00:07:27.680 |
The first one is 40% of annual deaths caused by the top five causes of death in the U.S. 00:07:36.540 |
According to the CDC, for whatever that's worth to you, avoidable chronic disease accounts 00:07:44.440 |
And finally, on the other hand, patients with a PCP, a primary care doctor, spend 33% less 00:07:49.960 |
on health care overall because they're front-loading that spend toward prevention. 00:08:00.320 |
We are starting to see more and more practices shift towards models that incentivize physicians 00:08:06.540 |
So there are two models we can use here to change the compensation model to allow physicians 00:08:11.620 |
to have time and space to think about service. 00:08:17.240 |
So that's making the patient the customer again in this scenario. 00:08:21.580 |
And the second one is leveraging value-based care models where they ensure that they're 00:08:26.360 |
So we're not just saying, "Hey, we're going to give you a new patient.