Welcome to the latest edition of Cast & Hue’s Five on Friday newsletter. Each Friday, we deliver a quick summary of five items of note associated with the evolving healthcare consumer, strategy and marketing. We hope you find it interesting and useful!

Yelp Provides Untapped Insights Into Patient Experience

Modern Healthcare

Painting a true picture of patient satisfaction can sometimes prove to be difficult. Many of the surveys and physician scores neglect the finer details that provide some context around a patient’s stay, but one only needs to look to Yelp to get more information. The insights gained from Yelp showcase the good and the bad in various hospital systems, and are currently an untapped resource of information on how to alter the patient experience to meet the needs of today’s modern healthcare consumer. In this article for Modern Healthcare, Sabriya Rice dives into how best to utilize Yelp as part of the the patient journey, how it differs from traditional sources of information, and how it can help shape patient experience.

Crux Points Podcast - Understanding Today's Healthcare Consumer

Sitewire Health Rose Maljanian of HealthCAWS joins the podcast to talk about engaging the evolving healthcare consumer. Look forward to Rose sharing why she doesn’t think that hiring leaders from consumer-focused or retail organizations is necessarily the best move for healthcare organizations and why she equates the transformation in healthcare right now to “living in house while it is being renovated.”

How Real is Healthcare Consumerism?

HealthLeaders Media

Healthcare is becoming more and more like your neighborhood department store or online ecommerce site. Patients have more options and have started to shop around for healthcare with the best value, but how far has this transition come? How close is healthcare to being fully consumer driven? In this article for HealthLeaders Media, Gregory Freeman looks at the increasingly consumer-like behavior in the healthcare space, the limitations in the healthcare industry that impact healthcare consumerism, and much more.

Study: Satisfied Hospital Patients Less Likely To Go Back

Philly.com

When patients are satisfied, they are less likely to go back to the hospital. This statement seems fairly straightforward; a patient goes in sick or injured, gets treated, and leaves, but what we’re really talking about here isn’t the quality of treatment, its the quality of the overall patient experience. According to this article for Philly.com by Tom Avril, patients who are satisfied with their overall experience in a hospital are less likely to have to visit again than those who may have received quality treatment, but were treated poorly from an experience standpoint. In this article, Tom looks at the reasoning behind this, the data to back it up, and how these insights can help systems develop their own patient experience programs.

If Healthcare Prices Emerge, Americans Won't Link to Quality

Forbes

Generally when you pay more for something, you expect it to be of high quality. Unfortunately, according to recent studies, this does not hold true for the healthcare industry. With seemingly arbitrary pricing that differs all around the country, patients do not link paying more for their healthcare to receiving higher quality care. In this article for Forbes, Bruce Jansen takes a look at these studies and what they reveal about how patients are shopping for care with this concept in mind and what it means for insurers and healthcare systems in the U.S.

That is it for this week. We hope you find value in this newsletter and invite you to share your thoughts in the comments section.