Enabling Healthy Decisions

What a great week. I have been so busy that I haven’t had time to blog, but I will try to catch up over the next few days.

I always love to mingle with customers and talk to them about their experiences with a company. As a former client, a current consultant, and a future employee of Silverlink, I got to join their customer event this week where 40 customers talked about how they use the technology and services to lower costs, increase efficiency, and grow revenue. Talk about empowering.

Some of the key content / discussions revolved around the following:

• JD Powers study on healthcare company satisfaction including a great non-healthcare example.
  • It showed how satisfaction with auto insurance actually went up and was higher when the company raised rates but pro-actively told the consumer versus when they lowered rates. Talk about the power of communications.
• Lots of talk about how marketing and data analytics are going to drive healthcare and how non-healthcare companies are setting the expectations for patients very high compared to the current state.
• How disjointed healthcare communications are – provider, pharmacy, PBM, MCO, DM companies. No consistency.
• A great presentation by Liz Boehm from Forrester research which made a few key points:
  • She reinforced the loss avoidance point I blogged about the other day stating that savings is equal to one unit of happiness while loss is equal to two units of unhappiness. So, for many, losing money is a bigger factor than saving money.
  • She pointed out the fact that any healthcare site that quotes a price always has some disclaimer about the accuracy. Why can’t we simply guarantee a price (like any other industry)?
  • She showed that member services (IVR, web) are the 3 most important factor in chosing a carrier after price and network.
  • She showed research that consumers are generally dissatisfied with contacts across all channels from their health plan.
  • She talked about using a persona to design programs and prioritize efforts.
  • She compared channels across cost, reach, engagement, and immediacy.
  • It was obvious that we have a long way to go.
• Heard from a few customers that talked about how they allow Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) to go “off the clock” to help patients so that they can still track average call time but allow for flexibility.
• I talked about process innovation and how to apply that to your communication process. I also talked about business process outsourcing.
• We heard about best practices in driving response rates. Everyone always seems so amazed when they hear about response rates of 50, 60, or 70%. Very difficult to get and/or measure that in other channels.
• Talked about how MCOs are using the automated call technology – ANOC (Annual Notification of Change) for Medicare, Collections, Lead Management, COB, Missing Information, Wellness Program Recruitment, Reminders, Surveys, and many others.
• We heard about calculating the ROI with a detailed methodology.
• We talked a lot about models from other industries that could apply.
• We talked about data mining and analytics.
• We talked about member satisfaction, loyalty, and how to survey and capture that information.
• An outside consultant talked about experience based branding and how sounds can be your brand – Harley‘s engine, Sprint‘s pin drop, Ford‘s door chime, AOL‘s “You’ve Got Mail”.
• Had several clients talk about how they use Silverlink‘s technology to enhance their product suite

All of the conversations and presentations reinforced how critical successful communications are to healthcare and how big of a hill we have to climb. It was great to see how effective, timely, and personalized the Silverlink technology could make the process. It is worth looking into if you are a managed care company, a device supplier, a PBM, a pharmacy, or even a provider.