In 2018, John Brinkmann, MA, CPO/L, FAAOP(D), wrote a feature article in The O&P EDGE about what O&P providers should call the people they treat. Are they patients, clients, or consumers? He considered how each label can affect patient’s self-perception of themselves, the attitudes toward them, and their clinical relationships.
Aside from discussing the meaning behind patient and consumer, the Becker’s article considered variations of other healthcare terms, including physician assistant versus physician associate, and precision medicine versus personalized medicine. Similarly to how The O&P EDGE has written about holistic care, Becker’s writes that personalized medicine and precision medicine are often used interchangeably, but precision medicine may be overtaking “because the word ‘personalized’ implies a treatment developed uniquely for each patient, which overstates what the science actually delivers.”
These terms are often created for healthcare policy reasons by bureaucracies such as CMS and HHS, but may not speak to people-first principles. With patients taking more agency over their healthcare, the evolution of patient, client, and consumer (and the grey areas they imply or ignore) are likely to be up for discussion and individual opinion.
“Unfortunately, labels that have been suggested as a replacement for patient, such as client, customer, or consumer, present additional problems, since they can define the relationship primarily as an economic or commercial one,” Brinkmann wrote.
One online discussion drew lines in the definitions, saying that medical professionals have patients, while medical facilities have clients, making the point that patient care implies there is a patient to care for.
In an earlier article in Becker’s, Jeff Margolis, then a developer of healthcare tech, used an analogy to compare the terms patients and consumers in the same way that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.
“Patients are to squares as consumers are to rectangles,” he said, “In healthcare, the same principle can be applied to patients and consumers. A patient is also a healthcare consumer, but a consumer is not necessarily a patient.1
How does the patient’s preference fit into these choices that are made about them? According to a 2019 scoping study, “healthcare recipients appear to prefer the term ‘patient,’ with few preferring ‘consumer.’2 And while some O&P patients may bristle at being called a patient, it may not always be practical to use person-first language such as “the person receiving O&P care” or “a user of an O&P device,” and following their preferred term—perhaps just his or her name—may be the simplest. In that light, a Salesforce blog post writer said, “Patients? Consumers? They’re just people on a journey.”3
To read “‘Provider,’ ‘Consumer’: The Terms Healthcare Can’t Agree on,” visit Becker’s Hospital Review.
To read “Patient, Client, or Customer: What Should We Call the People We Work With?” visit The O&P EDGE.
Patient, Client, or Customer: What Should We Call the People We Work With?
References
