HealthCare.gov

If you haven’t been to HealthCare.gov for a while, go and check it out. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that HealthCare.gov was built by a company and not the government. This is true all the way down to the HealthCare.gov Blog featured on the home page. I applaud Todd Park and the others at HHS who took a different approach to how a government website should look and feel. They even have a scrolling set of stories about patients and benefits. You’d think they have something to sell us.

Well, I guess they do have something to sell. They are definitely trying to sell us on ACA (aka Obamacare) and the benefits that come from Obamacare. Although, the tools that I found most interesting were the Insurance Options Wizard which walks you through all the options you have to getting insurance. Not to mention a whole set of tools to try and help people understand using insurance. Although, I’m pretty sure most of that’s not going to be read. So, hopefully it’s got a good dose of search engine optimization applied so that it will show up in search engines where it might get a chance at being read.

We’ve written about the “Comparing Care Providers” part of HealhCare.gov before. It’s pretty gutsy for a government organization to go there at all. Certainly they are taking a pretty high level approach to their “comparison” but we’ll see how much they dig into it going forward. Will those doctors that are part of an ACO that’s striving to be reimbursed on the quality of care be listed different than other doctors? It will be interesting if tools like these start to differentiate which patients go to which providers.

I do wish that the website did more to get patients involved in their healthcare. Here’s what I said in my “All I Want for Christmas…” post on EMR & HIPAA:

More Empowered and Trusted Patients – Imagine where the patient was a full participant in their healthcare. That includes being trusted and listened to by their doctor and a patient who thoughtfully considers and listens to their doctor. This is not a one sided issue. This is something that both patients and doctors can improve. There are as many belligerent patients as their are arrogant doctors. We need a good dose of humility, care and trust re infused into healthcare. I think they only way we’ll get there is for the lines of communication to open up on an unprecedented level.

Seems like HealthCare.gov is one place that could help reach this goal. I guess in some ways the physician comparison engine could work towards this. How cool would it be if they listed which of the physicians used EHR and which EHR that physician used? Reminds me of “Got EMR?” ad campaigns I first wrote about about 6 years ago.

EMR or Not, we’re quickly heading to a world where doctors are differentiated on the technical services they provide their patient. Doctors are starting to be judged by their medical website and the services they provide on that website. Do they accept online appointment requests? Do they accept online payments? Can the patient communicate electronically with the clinic? Can the patients receive their patient records electronically?

It will start with a handful of doctors and then start to spread. Plus, it will be accelerated if HealthCare.gov or some other website starts to highlight those doctors who offer these type of services and those that don’t.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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