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DALLAS TWP. — Picture this: After your medical treatment is done you go to an app on your smart phone, enter a code for the condition treated and get a chance to say what you liked or didn’t like. Sounds like standard stuff right? Add one more step.
“On the next page of the app is ‘I would like a refund’,” Geisinger Health System President and CEO Dr. David Feinberg explained. “The refund page knows how much you paid. There’s a sliding scale. You can ask for $100 back, or $2,000 back.”
It’s not a hypothetical. During the sixth annual Health Care Symposium at Misericordia University Friday, Feinberg, the keynote speaker, said the app already has had a soft launch. It’s called Geisinger ProvenExperience and it will be formally launched Tuesday.
“We’re going to do everything right. That’s our job, that’s our promise to you,” Feinberg told more than 300 health care professionals and students. “And you’re the judge. If you don’t think so, we’re going to apologize, we’re going to try to fix it for the next guy, and as a small token of appreciation we’re going to give you some money back.”
Feinberg conceded that when he talked about this notion at a meeting of CEOs from various companies, they nixed it. “Every single one of them said, ‘David, you’re making a big mistake. Don’t do it. Health care is different. Patients don’t care if they wait, they don’t care what the front desk is like, it’s all about trust with their doctor.’ ”
Changes needed
But something has to be done to change the health care system, Feinberg added. He compared the refund idea to getting a coffee at Starbucks. “If the barista makes it for you and you sip it and you don’t like it, Starbucks says we will make you a new coffee or give you your money back. I’ve never seen a Starbucks barista sip the coffee and say no, we made it right, you have to drink it.”
Feinberg mentioned the app at the tail end of speech that included a brief history of Geisinger and its other innovations, including adopting electronic records 20 years ago and using genetic information to practice “anticipatory medicine.”
He recounted a 16-year-old girl who came in dehydrated from soccer. They found she had a gene “that predicted for that fatal cardiac arrhythmia you read about, where a student athlete falls over and dies. She was probably not dehydrated, it was probably the heart.”
A check of those digitized records showed others in her family had the same risk. Some were notified and advised to consider a pacemaker.
“No where else in America can you do that,” Feinberg said.
Early feedback on the ProvenExperience idea suggests patients don’t want money back, Feinberg said. “They tell us when you make a mistake what we want is for you to own it and apologize, and then we can talk about it.”
Feinberg envisions other big changes in the field as health care becomes more focused on the patient experience:
• Same day appointments upon request;
• Easy to understand bills;
• Automatic delivery and installation of supplies you may need upon returning home from surgery;
• Office visits where you go directly to the exam room and the doctor is already there waiting for you, rather than you waiting for the doctor.
Wasted time
“A study just came out. People spend 20 minutes driving to the doctor, average 40 minutes waiting for the doctor, and 15 minutes with the doctor,” he said, contending that creates a great waste of health care dollars. “I don’t think people are going to put up with it. I think our industry is going to be disrupted the same way the taxi industry is (with services like Uber) or the hotel industry (by services like Airbnb).
“I don’t know if a money-back guarantee or warranty is the right way to do it,” he said, “but I do know if we don’t figure out how to do it, somebody else is going to do it.”