Health care consumers are not homogenous

Does that mean we’re not non-fat? But seriously, the above headline comes from Deloitte who claims to have “discovered” that health consumers do not think and behave the same, and now claims knowledge of “the six segments” that define health care thinking for the whole country based on a sample of 3,000. That’s great. But, you know Yankelovich recently did their own really large survey of over 20,000 respondents across 14 countries including the U.S. and found twenty-five segments? And what about the nine health consumer types promoted by the PATH Institute (my company) that were discovered back in 1989 and that have been verified across the U.S. with over 250,000 people?

 

Sorry, Deloitte, but to say you’ve discovered that U.S. health consumers are not homogenous is to claim discovery of something that’s been scientifically known for almost twenty years, and intuitively known for a lot longer than that. It’s one thing to truly discover hidden segments of people who share common thinking and behavior patterns, and it’s another thing to create them with a fancy statistical routine. I’m pretty sure I could prove you’ve done the latter, and that’s a shame. Because lots of people will look at your name and trust your “discovery” and only later find out it has no legs. That will just make my job tougher!

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Tags: health care, Health care consumers, health consumer behavior, segmentation

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