Following up on last week’s graphic covering the public’s declining view of US healthcare quality, this week’s graphic illustrates recent trends and changes to the consumer healthcare shopping experience. Under a standard consumer choice model, prospective patients weigh the available financial and quality information about their provider options against their own preferences and cost constraints. In theory, cost-exposed consumers will shop for higher-value care, inducing competition from providers to offer the highest-quality or most-affordable services. Based on this theory, and to minimize their own liability for healthcare expense growth, employers have shifted increasing shares of their covered workers to high-deductible health plans—60 percent of covered workers faced single-coverage deductibles of at least $1K in 2024, up from 22 percent in 2009. The unfortunate flaw in this model is that healthcare consumers lack full information about the price and quality of healthcare services. Even with improvements to price transparency, fewer than one in five adults are aware of their healthcare costs before they receive care.

As for quality, consumers care about a provider’s licensure, years of experience, and reputation, but these are only proxy measures for the quality of a given care experience. Instead, patients often rely on other factors like convenience and access to select their providers, which are important aspects of quality shopping experience more so than a quality healthcare experience. And while quality information about providers remains underutilized, patients have embraced the tracking of their personal healthcare data through wearables and other health tech, which has further altered the patient-provider relationship. More than ever before, patients are coming to healthcare services with opinions and data about their own health, while paying for more of their care themselves. In this sense, they’re becoming not just consumers of care but customers—who are (supposedly) always right.