AHIP Panel

I am at the AHIP meeting here in Chicago. This morning, I had the opportunity to facilitate a panel which included three speakers on the topic of communicating with members:

• Stan Nowak, CEO of Silverlink Communications
• Marc Palmer, CEO of ConnectYourCare
• Dennis Barnes, CEO of Marketing Direct

It was a great discussion with strong attendance. I think we had 20 people standing in the hall outside the room listening for an hour. Here are some of the questions we discussed. Since I normally give my opinion (and couldn’t this morning), I will here. [And, since ½ the questions were ones that I thought of on the spot, the panel did great on their feet.]

• How has Medicare Part D changed the way that healthcare companies interact with consumers?
  • It has forced them to think about members as consumers. They can vote 100% with their feet (within a window). And, this is the group with the most spend and highest utilization. They require segmentation and new services to drive behavior. All of this is new.
• Healthcare is a front page topic in the news and the upcoming election. How has this changed consumer expectations for healthcare communications? And, what are the top 3 challenges for dealing with this consumer?
  • Consumers know what to expect and what to ask for. They want transparency (whatever that means to them). They want information. They expect companies to do more than simply react to claims. There is a proactive expectation and patients are comparing them not to healthcare companies but to retail companies like Nordstroms or Disney. (see blog entry on “If Disney Did Healthcare“)
  • The top challenges – understanding what is valuable to them, understanding how they digest and react to information, and providing them with a single face that isn’t disjoined across functional areas, business units, and external companies.
• In most companies, there if no “patient ombudsman” that drives branding and message consistency. How can healthcare companies overcome this functional or process “silo” approach to communications?
  • Companies need to do a communication audit to understand how communications get out the door and how many communications a patient receives. They need to integrate their programs (inbound and outbound) and set a series of rules and triggers to manage communications across all medium. They also need to establish processes that are integrated cross-functionally to initiate communications but reference them back to a corporate set of rules.
• Up until recently, much of the members experience with the plan was based on the service experience they got from the inbound call center. How has that changed and what are the elements in this new world that will drive satisfaction and loyalty?
  • I don’t think much has changed. The high utilizers of heathcare are still seniors. As someone else first said “pushing Health2.0 to a 1.0 population is difficult”.
  • But, I think that retention and loyalty are new and important. Most companies don’t understand satisfaction at an individual level. Nor have many health plans embraced loyalty type programs. Personalizing the value proposition, constant communications, and establishing incentives to drive healthy and cost effective behavior is essential.
• Every company struggles with budget and ROI. The key is getting more for less. How are companies optimizing their communications and are they embracing a permission based approach as in the right message to the right person at the right time via the right channel?
  • Companies are aggressively looking at communication objectives and think through how to use multi-modal approaches. No one has really figured out permission based marketing (that I know of). Having a clear purpose for touching a patient and finding a metric to study the impact of that communication is essential to developing an ROI. Communications (and your vendors) have to have shared incentives that drive the right behavior which is focused on clear ROI.
• Give me your craziest idea about how technology can change the healthcare communication framework over the next 5-10 years?
  • Integration of health, Rx, and lab data into a PHR that is embedded in a smartcard and which launches proactive communications to the health team using intelligent, learning algorithms which are personalized based on individual genetics
• Since MDs, RPhs, and RNs are some of the front line contacts for patients, how do companies engage them to drive behavior?
  • This is still the problem. These people are so focused on care and so bombarded with information from multiple payors that unless there is a concentration from a single payor or technology that doesn’t impact their workflow it is hard to get them involved. And, in many cases, without P4P (pay for performance), there may not be much of an economic incentive for them to do things differently.
• How will things like JD Powers and HEDIS focusing on communications and measuring satisfaction impact communications?
  • I think this is the key. Plans need to get scored, ranked, compared, and published relative to what they do, how they do it, effectiveness, cost per success, complaints, and patient satisfaction with the communications.

I am getting a little wordy here so let me move on. The point is that this is a great topic with lots of passionate people figuring it out. I have seen more consumer packaged goods people coming into healthcare over the past few years than anyone could have imagined a few years ago.