The Patients Speak: A viewpoint of today's health care consumer

Welcome to our first volume of The Patient Speaks: A viewpoint of today's healthcare consumer, which aims to highlight how patients interact with their healthcare decisions and how 83bar, a Patient Activation firm, helps to activate patients.

This this edition you'll find real patient responses to questions asked by 83bar that relate to common medical conditions.

When I founded 83bar in 2016, the goal was simple. Help companies understand that patients are the real health care consumers. Not physicians, Not health care organizations. Time had come to change the paradigm. Patients self educate and make decisions. Yet the system still catered to physicians as the key decision makers.

Sadly, we, as health care consumers, are still subjected to the insanity of repeatedly filling out redundant forms, being shuffled into long queues in poorly lit and uncomfortable waiting rooms and often left with more questions than answers about our health care.

The purpose of this series of publications is to share what we have learned from health care consumers in the past eight years at a global level. The goal continues to be to serve as a beacon of light and a repository of information that will provide a framework for a more educated and robust patient activation process in the US health care marketplace.