Enabling Healthy Decisions

We had our client event a few weeks ago (and I am finally digging out). Additionally, I had the privilege to attend one of our client’s big internal events last week. They both gave me lots to think about. I am grouping them all together here to share.

• Payors are becoming more interested in BPO (business process outsourcing) today. (Is that an economic reality or a competitive need?) Disease Mgmt is the exception here as plans are moving it back in-house.
• Even thought over 30% of payors have more than 4 backend systems, some of them are looking for new claims systems for their individual business.
• Marketing is the #1 investment area for 2009 (and hasn’t been in the top 10 for the past decade).
• One plan out there has 72 different business intelligence tools they are using.
• 67% of members haven’t been contacted by their plan in the past 18 months. (Is that good or bad?)
• 80% of members get information from general healthcare sites not the health plan website.
• Payors are starting to get into (or investigate) the social media world.
• Reducing 3 risk factors (e.g., smoking) would reduce 80% of diabetes and 40% of cancers.
• Safeway has kept their healthcare costs flat for 4 years by using incentives.
• Over 80% of Americans are on 3-tier plans.
• Only 10% of MDs aware of the cost of a drug to the patient…
  • And most think it’s the RPh’s job to address this
  • But 70% of patients don’t know the cost before it’s adjudicated
  • And 60% of patients w/o coverage don’t talk to MDs about cost
• Just following guidelines would improve care and costs dramatically (e.g., hypertension by 25%)
• Starting patients on generics increases their likelihood of reaching an MPR > 80%
• For the same location, Marriott makes 8% more revenue than competitors based on personalization and use of data
• The Royal Bank of Canada is beginning to use the value of your social network in determining things like your interest rate (e.g., John has a high net worth cousin that we want to retain).
• Your IQ score plus your credit score can explain 95% of your success as an employee
• At NetFlix, they found that people like their recommendations better than the movies people chose themselves
• High performing companies are 5x more likely to consider analytics a key part of their strategy
• One CEO is so focused on analytics that they talk about firing people for not using a control group.
• Analysis is not an ideal but a truism. You have to both have the data and the intelligence to interpret it.
• Healthcare is just realizing that consumers can be “convinced” to use specific products or services.
  • Behavorial economics (fear) versus inspiration (love).
• There are more fast food restaurants in states with higher obesity – vicious cycle.
• You have to engage consumers on their terms.
• Do consumers really know what they want? If you ask them about receiving health care communications, what would they say? Can you honor those preferences? When do you override them?
• Is communications and member insights really the only way to differentiate versus competition?
• Your brain takes in more information than it can process…this is why sleep, exercise, relaxation, etc. is necessary for your brain to process all of it. (If true, do you forget more if you don’t do those things?)
• You have to have both the Hedgehog (people that dig deep on data) and the Fox (people that connect the dots) to be successful. (Good to Great)
• Personalization and pro-active communications are key.
• 65% of healthcare products will be personalized in the next 5 years. (What are you doing to get there?)
• BWM offers a great example of customization:
  • You could name your mini-Cooper
  • Your personalized key fob would activate billboards that showed a personal message (Hi Herbie!)
• Interesting discussion on using automated member satisfaction solutions versus live agents. Do you get different outcomes? Which is more accurate?
• Do members want to be “treated like a friend”? Wouldn’t some view this as too intrusive / presumptive?
• Can you really motivate your employees if you have no personal relationship with them? I was surprised to hear some people say yes.
• The most difficult thing is to stop doing what we’ve been doing.
• Do you want to be part of a corporation or a movement?
• 65% of employees are looking for another job (even in today’s economy).
• 80% of employees don’t look forward to Monday (and heart attacks and strokes are higher on Monday mornings).
• 25% of big company CEOs would meet the clinical guidelines to be defined as a psychopath.

Hopefully, like me, these give you a few things to think about and chew on.