Data from CVS Health showed that a tech-enabled approach to personalized and affordable care access is critical in an era of healthcare consumerism.
Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare consumerism was tipping toward more personalized, affordable, and tech-enabled healthcare access, according to new survey data from CVS Health.
Fielded back in March, the Path for Better Health survey looked at responses from 1,000 adult patients about what they need from their healthcare. Responses aligned with previous work on healthcare consumerism: patients want to use technology to access healthcare. They want it to be simple, they want to be personalized to their needs, and they want it to be affordable.
For example, 48 percent of patients would be more likely to communicate with healthcare entities more frequently if they could do so using secure direct messaging, a statistic that’s up from 41 percent in a 2019 iteration of the survey.
Thirty-two percent said the same about telehealth, which is up from 19 percent last year, and 29 percent about asynchronous platforms like FaceTime or Skype, up from 20 percent in 2019.
Forty percent of consumers said they would be very likely to receive virtual healthcare for mental or behavioral health needs if it was available to them.
Although these responses were fielded back in March, before anyone quite understood the immense ripple effects the novel coronavirus would have on all walks of life, they resonate strongly now.
