Enabling Healthy Decisions

After trying a few entrepreneurial things, I am excited to have accepted a job working with a consulting client of mine – Silverlink Communications. [I am also a former client of theirs from my time at Express Scripts.] The role is a good mix of entreprenerial and stability since they are a high growth, VC backed company. And, one of the most impressive things is their track record of delivery and impressive clients including lots of the big MCOs and PBMs (examples).

As I was getting ready to do an e-mail blast out to a 1,000+ people in my Outlook database, I figured that linking them to the blog and answering their predicted questions here might be a good solution. I could go with the micro-segmentation of my audience (i.e., my healthcare friends want to know something different than my consulting friends) that I started to do, but it’s turning out to be more time consuming than I would like.

So here goes. Here is more information about what I am doing and why. If you are in the healthcare space, I would encourage you to look at Silverlink and give me a call. We can leverage our technology and services to help you cut costs, grow revenue, and inprove patient satisfaction and outcomes.

Q&A:

• Who is Silverlink and what do they do? Silverlink is a healthcare technology company that provides HIPAA compliant, targeted communications to patients [consumers] primarily using a automated voice-centric technology. This allows them [us] to push information (e.g., reminder call), collect data (e.g., surveys, COB, HRA), and qualify leads for transfer to a live agent (e.g., retail-to-mail, brand-to-generic, 30-day to 90-day). They provide consulting support, data mining, and great reporting. [and now outsourcing]

[Official PR Text] Silverlink is the leader in automated voice solutions for healthcare enterprises. Silverlink’s services enable customers to design, deploy and manage HIPAA compliant automated call programs to educate, collect information from and drive behavior of thousands of patients and members at a time. Serving six of the top ten health plans and with a customer base that collectively represents over 150 million covered lives, Silverlink drastically reduces the cost of communicating with customers while improving financial results and customer care.

• Why did you join Silverlink? (A) Proven Value Proposition and Technology. (B) Great Team. (C) Very Impressed by Client Feedback. (D) Good Investors. (E) Great Market Demand.

We saw great results at Express Scripts. In one controlled study we ran through research, we saw our success rates improve by 30% by blending letters and calls. Additionally, access to data and flexibility were critical. We launched one new call program in under a day (either for Katrina or for a new drug warning).

Everybody is talking about consumerism and Health 2.0. Silverlink plays right into that strategy. Delivering timely information to patients. Blend their core technology with multi-modal, data mining, and experience based branding, and you have a unique opportunity to change the paradigm.

• What are you going to do for them? I am going to be responsible for building out a business process outsourcing (BPO) and professional services group. As with any process oriented change, technology often enables step improvements. Their core technology has allowed companies to radically reduce key metrics (cycle time, response rates, collection ratios). By helping drive more of the process, introducing some new services, and leveraging our industry experts, we will help clients drive market differentiation.

• Should I look at them as a solution provider for my business? If you are a PBM, mail order pharmacy, specialty pharmacy, medical device fulfillment company, or managed care company, they have many proven solutions to help you with. If you are a retailer, disease management company, or provider, there are numerous ways to use the technology. And, if you are a technology or services company, there are ways of embedding their technology into your solution.

• Do consumers really like automated calls? You would be surprised. Using good voice talent with the right caller ID with the right sonic branding will get people to answer the phone. People throw away mail. We get too many e-mails. We still answer the phone and listen to voicemails. The response rates are great. On some programs, a reach rate in the 80-90% rate is not unusual.

• (For my VC friends) Who backed them? There are several angels along with HLM (big healthcare VC firm), Kaiser Ventures, and Sigma Partners ($1.5B technology VC firm).

• What happened to the other things you tried over the past year? Neither took off. Learned a lot about being an entrepreneur. I put a lot of my lessons learned here. No regrets since I believe everything happens for a reason.

• Are you relocating? Not for now. We are going to try commuting. Since I will be spending time with clients and in other meetings, we are going to see how this works. Plus, the housing market is no good (at least for selling).

I am sure I could go on. But, while you are here, I would encourage you to look at the Silverlink website (PBM, MCO, Medicare, Medicaid, DM, Specialty/DME) and also at rest of my blog. If interested, register to get updates to the blog via e-mail by clicking here.