A New Study By CVS Shows That People Want More Personalized & Curated Care

The newly released CVS Health 2022 Health Care Insights Study illuminates the current state of healthcare and the changing notions of consumer preferences. A lot has changed with regards to healthcare and how people want to navigate their own well-being. Perhaps the most important finding of the study: “Consumers say they want more meaningful and engaging relationships with health care providers and want them to know about and address their holistic health goals.”

That is, consumers want their physicians and the entire healthcare team to be more involved in the longitudinal aspects of their lives—providing recommendations not only regarding acute health problems, but also regarding stressful events, emotional aspects, and general life satisfaction.

Per the report: “Whether their goal is decreasing daily stress levels or increasing overall well-being, 81% of consumers say it is very important their primary care provider is aware of patients’ overall happiness and life satisfaction levels, and to be aware of how patients deal with difficult emotions and stress.”

This has become an increasingly common theme in modern healthcare, as systems and organizations are increasingly paying attention to better embrace value based care. As the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services explains it, “Value-based programs reward health care providers with incentive payments for the quality of care they give to people…” In sum, the basic concept behind value based care is to incentivize care based on quality, rather than the quantity.

Overall, regardless of what the framework is called, healthcare organizations are starting to realize the value of holistic and comprehensive healthcare rather than point-of-care solutions. That is, rather than only treating the specific problem at hand, there is proven value in care outside of the actual acute event, e.g. following up to see how the patient fares after the problem is resolved. Undoubtedly, the most value (both in terms of patient quality of life and dollars saved) comes from preventing a problem from happening in the first place, when possible (i.e. preventative care).

Personalized care is increasingly relevant for patients that have very specific conditions or concerns. Take for example “long Covid”—a colloquialism that turned into a formal diagnosis and refers to symptoms that linger after a Covid-19 infection. These may range from fatigue, intermittent fevers, and headaches, to chronic cough, difficulty sleeping, depression, and many more. There are millions of patients that are afflicted by long Covid, and now require long-term management and care. This has inspired many primary care and specialty physicians to open practices based specifically around this, so as to provide curated and personalized care specifically to this patient population. Similarly, other conditions are also seeing increased attention in providing focused care, including entire clinics and facilities dedicated to rheumatological disorders, specific heart diseases, and other nuanced medical conditions.

The future of healthcare will undoubtedly focus more on personalizing care towards the patient. Given that no two patients are the same, this experiment will likely not only provide increased patient satisfaction, but also better healthcare outcomes overall.