Interview with Phyllis Anderson (Humana)

As part of my opportunity to be part of the press at the World Healthcare Congress, I opted to interview some of the participants and speakers. This is my first of several that I have scheduled.

I had a chance to sit down with Phyllis Anderson who is the VP of Corporate Marketing for Humana. She has an interesting background from Pillsbury, Nabisco, and Bank of America as I discovered when I asked her what they were doing to bring in non-healthcare people to help them address consumerism within healthcare. Her story about working on healthier snack foods where they wanted to protect the quality of taste while addressing the healthy trends in the US seems very applicable.

How do we manage our history of healthcare while addressing the sea of change?

We talked a little about the paradigm shift that they are addressing in moving towards an individualized healthcare sell. Phyllis talked about focusing on the benefit to the consumer. Sticking on that same concept, when I asked her about how they were addressing preference-based marketing, she talked about creating “viable consumer experiences”. She talked about looking at 3 factors: message x channel x frequency. She mostly spoke about the differences in needs / interests around messaging by health status. I asked about using different models like Prizm versus Pro-Change, and she said they were still exploring the right model.

Given what she said plus what one of her colleagues had said on the main stage, I asked her about how they captured feedback (i.e., indirect on direct) about satisfaction. She said that they ask for feedback on a lot of their outreach programs today.

Listening and Leading

She talked about their CEO’s term of listening and leading and trying to balance those two things. Sometimes you have to listen. Other times you have to lead the consumer. We also talked about the fact that if the patient isn’t engaged then it’s pretty hard for them to give feedback.

I then asked about how they’re using JD Power and Forrester’s healthy studies. I was glad to hear that they had embraced the JD Power study and were working on an expanded relationship with Forrester.