Evolving the Healthcare Consumer Experience Means Improved Personalization, Building Loyalty and Higher Touch Service

Is it possible for healthcare or health insurance experiences to become more like using streaming services?  

Actually, the healthcare experience should be even more personalized than a streaming experience. Why? Because healthcare is that much more personal and individual than entertainment. It’s hard to gain consumers’ trust, so we have to earn it by making the essential elements of healthcare as smooth as possible.  While we must know more about consumers—their needs, their lifestyle and their habits-- they have to be able to trust us with that information. 

One way we build trust is to be there for consumers when it’s convenient for them rather than limiting our assistance to specific office hours. . We can make it even easier and more convenient for people to reach us. They can begin a mobile chat session and come back to it minutes, hours, or days later. We work to make common requests, such as finding a care provider in the network, understanding plan benefits, managing claims, handling billing, and dealing with prescriptions, much smoother and simpler.

It’s not enough to personalize healthcare in the same vein as online shopping; we have to be even better. Technology allows us to make this a reality, yet we know we have a great responsibility to do this appropriately and in a way that keeps everyone’s data safe.
 

How do you foster consumer loyalty in healthcare benefits? How has the company’s role begun to change?

Building consumer loyalty in the realm of healthcare involves a shift in mindset. For decades, our business existed to perform very administrative functions. As we have transformed from that traditional health insurance company to a lifetime trusted health partner, we support consumers in their healthcare journey. This means that beyond providing health insurance benefits, we have introduced programs that complement the excellent work of our care provider partners and simplify the healthcare experience overall. For example, our affiliated health plan care managers  help members with everything from finding specialists to helping with housing to making sure they get a regular friendly phone call.

Concierge care, a program featuring an app that tracks symptoms and contains educational content supplemented by the expertise of a care manager, helps members manage serious illnesses any time of day. It’s available for people with various conditions, including Crohn’s disease, cancer, behavioral health conditions, and Type 2 diabetes.
 

What does the healthcare experience of the future look like? How is it different from today?

Today’s healthcare experience means navigating many different systems – from finding care to paying for it -- with very little visibility into what’s the best next step. It’s going to get a lot better very quickly, though.

Legacy healthcare technology was built in silos, and the same steps created to protect privacy and data became stumbling blocks when it came to serving consumers better. Just a short time ago, when people called us for assistance with a claim, we went through many steps with them to verify their identity, confirm their benefits, and articulate the reason for the call. This takes away precious time from addressing their concern. Now, modern technology, specifically artificial intelligence, allows us to go through the same steps instantaneously. We already know why someone has reached out and we should know if they have called us previously so we can be more proactive and personal in solving that problem. This kind of service has only become possible in the last few years because of the power of data and new technology.  

The healthcare experience of the future may look like our ‘My Health Advocate’ model (currently in use in our affiliated Medicare plans), in which our care managers (advocates) can resolve issues and get additional help to members when needed. Once an advocate helps a member, future contacts – calls, texts, emails – from that member are managed by the same advocate. This act of matching a member with an advocate also allows us to get to know that member better, which helps us personalize our efforts to support their health in the future.

Our vision for the future of healthcare involves being there for consumers even before problems start, solving issues quickly, and building long-lasting relationships with them. It's about treating each person as a unique individual.

Consumers have understandably high expectations for their healthcare experience. We know that in order to fulfill our purpose to improve the health of humanity, we must regularly meet and exceed those expectations.