Payers and providers should embrace the Trader Joe's business model to benefit customers and finances, Healthcare Payer News reported.
Healthcare organizations could learn something from Trader Joe's, which offers affordable, high-quality groceries, as they make the shift to patient-centered care and consumer-focused insurance. In particular, they should look to Trader's Joe's strategy of refining supply chains, driving out middlemen and trying out with new products.
"Trader Joe's was in a constant state of reinvention," Trader Joe's former president Doug Rauch, who retired in 2008 after 31 years, said in a Big Think presentation, Healthcare Payer News reported.
Critics of the healthcare status quo are pushing for insurers and providers to adopt Trader Joe's willingness to change products--for example, having insurers provide discounted drugs, exams and tests for high-risk patients, the article noted.
Looking to deliver that much-needed innovation in healthcare, savvy new companies drawing from ideas that transformed the retail and technology sectors are poised to siphon off tens of billions of dollars from traditional healthcare's $2.8 trillion in revenue, according to an April report from PricewaterhouseCoopers's Health Research Institute. Traditional healthcare companies will have to partner and innovate or face fading away, FierceHealthIT previously reported.
Meanwhile, some insurers aren't just taking business approaches from retailers but their leadership talent as well. Big-name insurers have been hiring executives from consumer-facing companies like Wal-Mart, Target and Coca-Cola to succeed in this new era of consumer-driven healthcare. Retail experts can drive insurers' consumerization strategies and transform consumer transactions into ongoing relationships, FierceHealthPayer previously reported.
To learn more:
- read the Healthcare Payer News article