Health care service “satisfaction scores” will be increasingly shaped by “consumer contagion,” according to a new analysis, The Direct-to-Patient Future of Health Care. What does this mean? Consumers do not benchmark their health care experiences against other experiences in health care—they benchmark them against the best consumer experience they have had anywhere.

The good news for executive teams is that great consumer experiences are harder to find than ever. The challenge is that they do exist—and consumers take note.

But how do leadership teams get ahead of this new reality—and plan for the fact that their “experience rating” is going to be compared to experiences in restaurants, in retail shops, and on online service centers? A recent article,…