Enabling Healthy Decisions

You hear a lot these days about preference based marketing.  The idea is that consumers (or members or patients) select how you interact with them.  In healthcare, this means things like:

• What types of communications do you want to receive?
• How do you like to be communicated with – letter, web, live person, automated call, text message?
• When do you like to be communicated with – day, time?

Of course, companies then have to figure out what rules to use in terms of when to trigger communications.  The next question is how to personalize the communication.

So an interesting question is…does the company have a responsibility to their members to use their data to drive them to actions that are in the member’s best interest?

Do companies always do what’s right…probably not, but I do believe that they want to do the right thing.  They want to drive successful outcomes.  They want patients to be healthy.  They want patients to save money.

Now, my chicken and egg analogy is which comes first the selection of what my preferences are or experiencing the communication.  How do I know whether I want a refill reminder if I have never received one?  How do I know which channel I prefer if I haven’t experienced each of them?  And, since each communication can vary based on messaging and many other variables, can one good or bad experience bias my selection?

I am a big believer in the fact that the experience matters for healthcare.  From my architecture days, this means physical space, sequence of events, bedside manner of the staff, clarity of communications, and processing of the claim (at the simplest level).  Everything that the patient experiences as associated with an event drives their satisfaction.

So, I was pleasantly surprised taking my daughter to the dentist a few weeks ago.  We had gone to a “kid’s dentist” before which was an hour away that I thought did a good job (although the kids hated going).  But, this one was over the top.

When you walk in, the entire room is covered with art (e.g., there is a giant Spiderman climbing on the ceiling).  There are video game stations in the corner.  There is a large flatscreen TV playing a slide show of pictures of the kids coming to visit that day.

And, it doesn’t stop there.  Each room is decorated.  The staff talks to the kids (more than the parent).  Every tool and process is explained to the kids in simple terms.  They sometimes give out balloons.

Just something to think about when you try to look at things from an outside-in perspective.  How is the patient experiencing your service?

I think it was earlier this year when LinkedIn rolled out a new feature called questions which allows you to pose questions to LinkedIn users and get answers. I continue to like this tool, and it has been interesting to watch it evolve from a “startup” (when I joined there were less than 2M members) to a tool that well over 10M people use and has gotten lots of press.

I finally decided to pose a question:

Do you have any good (or bad) examples of healthcare communications? I am looking for how your healthplan, disease management company, pharmacy, or PBM communicates with you. What worked or isn’t working? This could include letters, websites, phone calls, social media, etc. Examples might include communications around moving you to a 90-day prescription, moving you to a generic drug, improving your awareness of a disease, addressing compliance and adherence, reducing your out-of-pocket costs, etc.

I received four answers:

Answer One: I had some great success marketing to Medicare members by conducting health and fitness seminars as well as bring in experts to discuss retirement and other topics of interest. Initially, I’d obtain a 3% response through postcards and an additional 1.0% through phone calls. Conducting a series of seminars in one area can also bring in additional attendees (0.5%), through word-of-mouth buzz.

I found seminars to work well because the attendees were getting something of true value for their time (information and a social event with their peers) and I had a captive audience to market. A win, win situation.

Answer Two: My experiences with Blue Cross have been pretty good, there’s the health mag they send out with information articles, etc. I’ve never been able to access the website services though, something to do with the number that CS can never work out though I’ve tried on several occasions. I love my primary doctor and feel she and her partner give excellent care and plenty of information to their patients. They’re the only ones who’ve ever given me a reading list and web printouts! It was just a general question I had, not a condition I suffer from.

In addition to other tasks, I handle the health documents for the children enrolled with us and find that often the doctors have done a very poor job in informing the parents of what to watch for, what a result means, etc. Their offfice staff often do a shoddy job of filling out the forms correctly. Last month I recieved paperwork for a child, the physical form stated passed 20/20 for vision, it was accompanied by a referral from the doctor for a full eye exam as the child had failed the eye test miserably! I once received a normal hearing result for a child we knew was deaf as a door nail. When trying to get an insurance company to cover a needed service or therapy for such is incredibly difficult with that kind of paperwork.

Thanks for the opportunity to raise awareness!

Answer Three:
Aetna sent me a letter suggesting several plan options that may be cheaper than the one I currently have. That was a positive. I wish that I could compare the plans side by side on the website. It is difficult to remember the details of each one as you look at them individually.

Answer Four: As a health promotion practitioner, we are at a time when the national consciousness of health has never been higher. The most important thing we can do at a workplace is create individuals and systems that are health literate. We spend enormous amounts of money in our wrongly terms “health care” system. What we actually have is a “sick care” system, and what is truly missing are incentives and action by companies to recognize the billions of dollars we could save and then return to economy by protecting our workforce with sound health promotion. Our children are contracting early onset adult diabetes and we commonly refer to our bleak situation of the obesity epidemic. Our “health care” system, and thus the traditional “disease management” is from a biomedical chronic disease model.

It is time to work at reducing costs related to health care and absenteeism from a proactive rather than reactive approach. Many companies and organizations provide services that have yielded significant economic returns from building well companies.

According to the the NIH, most people are unhappy with our current system, and unable to continue to straddle the costs of ever increasing health care. We can avoid chronic disease by acknowledging new paradigms of business operations that include well companies. For information, contact www.positivepurposeinc.com