Why Choosing a Healthcare Network With Local Physicians is Vital for Health
As a healthcare provider, you may feel pressured to respond to new payment models and value-based contracts. But it’s also essential to think about your patient relationships.
A strong network can be a source of support for patients and a way to communicate with them. For example, a physician’s practice can post information online and let patients control when and how to share it with their friends.
Access
Access to healthcare is critical for health, enabling patients to receive timely care and manage chronic conditions. It also improves health outcomes and reduces healthcare costs.
Narrow network plans are gaining popularity as insurers and employers work with a smaller pool of doctors, hospitals, and treatment centers to keep premiums down. But they may offer a partial range of providers you need or want.
Call customer service or check online to verify which doctors, specialists, and hospitals are in your network. Most insurance companies have excellent provider look-up tools to help you find your needs.
Convenience
Convenience has become increasingly important in healthcare as patients seek options for care that best fit their schedules and lifestyles. The ability to book appointments online, communicate with doctors via video chat, submit symptoms through an app, and have providers visit you at home are all examples of how consumers want to interact with their healthcare organizations.
This article aims to explore whether people value convenience in health care and estimate the likely magnitude of those values by systematically reviewing the published literature. The literature focuses on process utility associated with comfort, which encompasses aspects of health care delivery, including the mode of administration and location of treatment.
Experience
When you choose a Healthcare Network with Local Physicians, such as Meritage Medical Network, you select a group of doctors, hospitals, and care providers that have agreed to contract with your health insurance company to provide medical services. The quality of your healthcare can vary greatly depending on the providers you work with. Likewise, your insurance policy may limit the types of physicians and facilities in your network or charge more if you receive services from out-of-network providers.
In an economy of commodities, goods, and services, experiences are unique in that companies craft them to engage individual customers on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or spiritual level. Unlike prior economic offerings, these experiences are inherently personal and memorable for buyers—a fact that will ultimately disrupt the status quo and make the experience economy grow faster than the commodity and service economies have done so far.
Personalized Care
Personalized care is critical for health, as it helps prevent disease and reduces the need to treat chronic conditions. It also enables patients to be more involved in their healthcare decisions and treatment plan, leading to greater satisfaction with the experience.
Personalization is about providing healthcare recommendations best suited for each patient or member based on their unique history, preferences, and where they are in their journey with the organization. Providers can use this information to tailor content to improve outcomes and build consumer trust.
Whether you’re an individual or a business, choosing a healthcare network with local physicians is essential for your health. Narrow network plans can be more affordable on average than broad networks, but the number of local physicians participating in these plans can be limited.
Trust
Healthcare networks have an opportunity to demonstrate that they genuinely know their patients and understand their needs. This is done by putting all data points to work and using it to create personalized experiences for consumers.
Trust is critical for health because it helps ensure people receive accurate and truthful medical information. It also can help reduce unnecessary medical procedures and encourage better compliance with recommendations.
While researchers have focused on individual relationships, trust also affects interactions between institutions and organizations. It is, therefore, important for healthcare organizations to examine how they can best support and nurture confidence among their leadership, staff, clinicians, and patients/caregivers.
