What do consumers really want? To answer that question in health care, we might want to look at leaders in other industries that have developed great reputations with consumers.

This past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine had a cover story about Toyota and how that company–now with a market capitalization of $240 billion, which is greater than GM, Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Honda and Nissan combined–has created the most profitable car company in the world. Toyota goes to extraordinary lengths to understand consumers’ needs.

In the NYT piece, Jon Gertner writes, “Toyota’s chief engineers consider it their responsibility to begin a design (or redesign) by going out and seeing for themselves–the term within Toyota is genchi genbutsu–what customers want in a car or a truck and how any current versions come up short.” Although Toyota’s Sienna minivan already was a remarkably successful product line, Gertner proceeds to tell his readers how the lead North American engineer took on the task of redesigning it by driving “the Sienna (and other minivans) in every American state, every Canadian province, and most of Mexico.” He ultimately logged 53,000 miles over 3 years in order to understand how conditions and consumers’ needs varied across the entire continent.

Likewise, Intuit–the maker of the wildly popular financial software Quicken and TurboTax–also believes that effective consumer research and development requires what they call “follow-me-home research.” In order to understand consumer needs, Intuit insists that you have to observe people directly in their everyday settings rather than just trusting self-reported survey data. Intuit is now taking this approach in developing their health care consumer finance software tools.

At our 5th annual information thearpy (Ix) conference last fall, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation provided the IxCenter with a grant that allowed us to bring consumers to present directly to our audience of health care professionals. By every account, their perspectives were invaluable to the diverse group of attendees, because it helped these professionals to tune in to what consumers really need as health care organizations design innovative Ix initiatives.

I’m hopeful that we’ll continue to be able to bring real-world patients, members, and consumers to our annual Ix conference. Over time, I also hope that we’ll have more opportunities to spend time observing and learning from people in their homes and doctors’ offices.

The more we do that, the more we’ll learn. The more we learn, the more we can help.

–Josh

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Research, The New Health Care Consumer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.