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It’s Not Enough to Deliver Care—Senior Care Must Deliver Consumer Confidence Too
Healthcare isn’t just a $4.6 trillion dollar industry—it’s a belief system. Like anything that unfolds over time, healthcare requires consumer faith. Faith they’ve made the right choice in plans and providers, that their treatment plan will work, that their provider will have good bedside manner, that they’ll be advocated for and listened to.
Sure, prospective patients have more online reviews than ever before, but, with bots and fake accounts on the rise, people still trust their friends and family first.
Health outcomes can be delayed by months or even years, especially when dealing with chronic conditions. It takes time for interventions to work, making it hard for senior consumers to evaluate their effectiveness upfront, let alone stick with them.
The problem is that the U.S. healthcare system isn’t set up for true preventive healthcare, especially for seniors. It’s designed for sick care.
Increasingly, that model appears broken from a financial and operational perspective. Despite business-model turmoil, one thing could be the ultimate tipping point—consumer mistrust.
The state of consumer mistrust in healthcare
Trust in government health agencies has continued to fall since COVID. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report, Trust and Health, 61% of surveyed Americans believe institutions, including business, government, and nonprofits, actively undermine their access to better care.
That same report shows an 18-point decline in trust in the media to report accurate health information. Friends and family have always impacted healthcare decisions. Now influencers have become our go-to healthcare experts over scientists, providers, public health professionals, and healthcare journalists.
Consumer mistrust and dissatisfaction are especially high in senior care
Only 11% of older adults give the overall U.S. health system an A grade. Here are the reasons seniors have lost faith according to a report from by Age Wave and The John A. Hartford Foundation:
- Care-delivery fragmentation
- Navigating a complex system
- High out-of-pocket costs
- Widespread inequities
- Wishing providers spent more time getting to know what truly matters to them
Too many seniors feel ignored, overlooked, dismissed, and treated like conditions rather than people. It’s no wonder they feel betrayed by the very system that proclaims it wants to help them.
Seniors are caught in the middle of payers and providers—not to mention politicians—pointing fingers at each other. Who’s actually standing up for seniors in all this?
What seniors want from their care
At the end of the day, seniors just want the healthcare system, especially their providers, to listen. They want carriers and providers to understand what matters most to them and how to help them achieve it. They don’t care about backend logistics. They just want to be well cared for.
The senior care organizations that practice senior-first care will win in the long run. Some are already working to fix this like value-based and accountable care organizations. Here’s how others can adjust.
- Respect seniors and what they want from their care. As people age, their priorities change. They may be focused on spending more time with loved ones, maintaining their independence, or continuing to do the things they love. It’s more about everyday quality of life and functional health rather than clinical health. Strategic senior care companies will adopt aging-friendly care practices that center on consumer wants and needs.
- Communicate their organizational values and how they support senior consumer goals. Too many senior care organizations get stuck on the bottom two rungs of the benefit ladder—talking up product/service features and functional benefits.
They skip over the emotional side (i.e., consumer goals) and what they, as a company, stand for. The senior care companies that express their values and the positive impact they make on seniors’ lives will be the ones to earn more market share.
- Show up for and protect senior consumers. Consistent actions speak louder than words, and care delivery extends beyond the exam room.
The senior care groups that do what they say they’ll do time and again will earn the trust of senior consumers. They are the ones who take the extra time to listen to seniors, who sit side by side with them as partners and dig deep to understand seniors’ whys.
The ones who protect senior consumers from complexity and confusion will come out on top. That means doing things like removing barriers to health like food or housing insecurity, streamlining prior authorizations, improving interoperability, and making the claims process simple to follow.
It all boils down to senior confidence
It’s time for the senior care sector to stop focusing only on tactical care-delivery frameworks and start focusing on enhancing seniors’ confidence in your organization and the healthcare system as a whole. This isn’t something marketing alone can fix. It requires a radical mindset shift at all levels and from every part of the healthcare system, including carriers, providers, and sales agents.
We need to get back to the foundations of senior care—helping people. That requires time and effort to make connections, strengthen relationships, and maintain trust. It sounds simple, but it isn’t easy.
While a plethora of data and new technologies promise to change healthcare for the better in the near and long term, we can’t afford to sacrifice the human side of things. Without emotion and meaning, senior care is just a brutalized and brutalizing business. Seniors deserve better.
There’s more senior-care thought leadership here. Check it out.