A new era of consumerism is emerging. Increasingly educated consumers are demanding convenience, choice, and self-efficacy or self-mastery. These educated consumers are causing businesses in a variety of service industries, including health care, to change their business design in response to changing consumer preferences. Increased consumer pressures to change health care business designs are evidenced by a flood of state and federal legislation and managed care organizations broadening their networks and product offerings to respond to consumer complaints about lack of choice. These pressures are also evidenced by educated patients, armed with information they have gathered via the Internet and other sources going to their physician and saying, “Together let's figure out how I can do this myself.”

In addressing the entire scope of illness cost drivers that are causing health care expenditures to spiral upward in this country, providers need not overlook the role that the effective relay of information plays in moving the patient from their traditional roles as resource and customer to more effective roles as co-producer and partner in the transformation process. Health care organizations and professionals must experience a paradigm shift in both their approach to providing health care and in their understanding of the new role of the patient as co-producer.