QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER | FALL 2023 – #46
Are Millennials Turning Their Backs on Traditional Healthcare Delivery Models? By Joy Stephenson-Laws, Managing Partner One aspect of the traditional revenue model for most healthcare providers includes a strategy of maintaining patient loyalty while capturing new patients to replace the revenue lost through attrition. The goal is to provide financial growth that will keep pace or outpace the rate of operating cost increases. Many providers implement this strategy through a combination of marketing and operational activities that, with some tweaks here and there, have worked sufficiently well. And since it wasn’t “broken,” there was no compelling reason to “fix it.” But the days of “marketing as usual” are over, thanks to the generation known as “Millennials” taking the place of “Baby Boomers” as the largest population
of people in the United States. According the U.S. Census Bureau, there are now over 83 million Millennials, (those born between 1981 and 1996), versus some 75 million Baby Boomers. Another way to put it, Millennials now represent a quarter of the U.S. population. And given that the older Millennials are now well into their 30s, this means that they are not only making healthcare decisions for themselves but most likely for their parents and grandparents as well. So, what does this mean for healthcare providers? It means that to ensure financial stability and viability over the next few decades, providers need to know how to attract Millennials to their facilities and how to keep them loyal. And, for many providers, this is
far more easily said than done since Millennials are nothing like previous generations on how they view healthcare and how they consume it. Perhaps one of the most visible changes, and one that has far-reaching implications for the industry, is that Millennials are abandoning Primary Care Physicians (PCPs) and opting instead for alternate sources of healthcare. Many of these options would not have even been contemplated as viable a decade ago. A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that almost 45 percent of Millennials do not have a PCP (compared to only 18 percent of their parents’ generation). And, if you look at their grandparents, that number drops