I was in an interesting roundtable discussion on patient-centered care yesterday (more on the main content of it some other time) when the usual dance about what to call “people who use health care services” led to the consistent use of the conjoined term “patient/consumer.”

As I heard this term being thrown around, it struck me that flipping the word “patient” from noun to adjective — as a modifier of “consumer” — characterizes part of what’s wrong in our health care delivery system. Americans for the most part are too [expletive of choice] patient with the absurd care that they get for more than $2 trillion a year.

For that much money, we shouldn’t be patient that: we can’t get access to timely information about our health; we can’t store that information securely to help us manage our health; and we can’t communicate when and how we need to with our clinicians about our health. (And a whole lot more.)

It’s not just a big problem. When you think about it, it’s downright ludicrous. It’s not that “patient consumers” are not upset at the care, service, quality, and access issues they face, but — for the most part — there is a certain level of acceptance.

I don’t know how long our society will tolerate this lack of attention to people’s real health care needs, but I hope that we begin to see the rise of the “im-patient consumer” to spark the care delivery system with a new sense of urgency about the need for deep reform on many levels.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Engaging Consumers, Patient-Clinician Relationship, 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.