Retail Thinking Comes to Health Care

Abstract

Retail thinking and tactics are beginning to find their way into health care delivery, further impacting the ability to have strong, dyadic doctor-patient relationships. External forces described in Chapter 2 and poor patient experiences provide fertile soil for their growth. The retail rhetoric consists of heavy emphasis on “value,” “transparency,” “branding,” and “consumer activation.” The implementation of retail tactics into health care shifts the emphasis from relational to transactional forms of exchange, the latter emphasizing short-duration exchanges between buyer and seller, standardized obligations, and economic satisfaction. Retail approaches give large health care organizations greater power given their scale and resources to engage in key retail tactics such as data analytics, market segmentation, marketing, and price competition. There are tangible reasons for bringing some aspects of retail thinking into health care. Their application, however, brings risks for patients and their care, and threatens to undermine doctor-patient relationships further.