But the tech companies that have excelled at disrupting industries, from bookstores to taxis, have typically done it by improving and transforming the consumer experience. Efforts to upend health care in the same way face a major challenge: Most consumers engage with the system infrequently and, when they do, patient choice tends to be superseded by health insurance plans and doctors.
.. compared being a patient in the traditional American health-care system to going to a restaurant with a rich uncle who pays, while the waiter chooses the food.
.. The patient may get to pick the restaurant, but the rich uncle is the insurance company and the waiter is the doctor, who is motivated to keep bringing more entrees and expensive wine.
.. When you go out to dinner, you can be booking airfare — you go to Travelocity, you try to get a good deal. That hasn’t been there in medicine
.. when members are trying to make a decision. … They don’t say, ‘I have a question or issue — let me go to Anthem.com.’ ”
.. change will come from employers and health plans that alter how the system pays for care.
.. policy and benefit design and insurance drive more change in health care, more than anything. It’s not a consumer market in the same way