29 Dec 2020

The Importance of Consumer Engagement

The Bikin’ Brokers released a new podcast episode on the importance of consumer engagement in the health insurance world. You can go here to listen to the episode. They spoke with John Griffiths, Chief Experience Officer, and Daniel Royer, Digital Experience Director, from SelectHealth on consumer engagement.

Consumerism Affect on Health Insurance

Consumerism has had a massive effect on the way people view health insurance. They want one thing – choice. Consumers are being put in the driver’s seat to understand cost and how it works. The importance of consumer engagement has skyrocketed over the past year.

select health and the importance of consumer engagement

The Goal of Transparency

No one can deny that health insurance information has been murky in the past. It can be difficult to understand. The trends are going towards transparency. People want to make transparency so that they can make educated choices about cost and quality.

Expectations

The goal for companies like Select Health and Intermountain Healthcare is to find out who the consumer is and what their perception and expectations are. This creates a framework for understanding consumer engagement. What the consumer is telling us today is that they are expecting the exact same experience they get with other technologies that can be delivered directly to their phone.

Expectations are not driven from a clinical perspective. The expectation is how do I use my mobile app to access all of my information in one place? Select Health and Intermountain are looking at the overall consumer experience.

As you think about the experience that we’ve all had in 2020, this pandemic has brought Amazon to the front and center. It’s very rare you have to call someone about an amazon package because they are very good at guiding your experience. That’s the same expectation people are coming back to you. They want to be guided through their healthcare experience.

Consolidating the Experience

How do we simplify and consolidate the number of experiences out there? Consumers don’t want a fragmented experience. One way Select Health and Intermountain Healthcare are trying to change that is through the My Health+ app. The app brings together many fragmented experiences. One website to another website. It sounds simplistic, but it’s changed the way our consumers engage with us. They log in once. They can then navigate to a bunch of experiences that feel the same, look the same, and act the same.

the my health+ app is focused on consumer engagement

The COVID-19 Affect on Consumerism

In COVID-19 times, it’s nice having all of your health information in one place. Being able to get lab results quicker than the doctor can call you is a huge deal. COVID has accelerated all of this. Being in a pandemic setting, people are not able to go in person as much to the doctor, so the outcome has been a significant focus on company tools. One of the biggest hurdles at Intermountain was creating a digital process that helps people fill out forms electronically.

As you think about technology and how it takes off, it’s a need. To be able to get the results of a COVID-19 test electronically makes everything run more efficiently. Consumers want to access the information they need in real-time. There have been lots of new things learned in the pandemic about access to healthcare information.

The process previous to 2020 was a very analog experience. It was very time consuming and cumbersome. So this year, it’s moved to how can we move that to a digital experience and speed up the process?

telehealth is crucial to the importance of consumer engagement

Connect Care

Telehealth visits have increased dramatically in 2020. Another thing 2020 has made people more aware of is the need to give consumers access to behavioral health resources. People being isolated means behavioral health needs have gone up. Telehealth and virtual visits are extremely important. Care in a virtual setting is now very accessible.

Healthcare Personalization

Consumers want their healthcare experienced to be personalized. When someone decides to interface with Select Health, they want it to be very personalized to that person’s health, health plan, and family member’s information that are on the plan. Another helpful and useful tool for personalization is personalized notifications – reminders specifically about your own health, lab results, and overall personal health information.

Personalization also includes introducing many self-service tools. One thing that remains a top priority is that all of these things have to be connected. One thing Select Health and Intermountain Healthcare strive to have is a 360-degree view of the customer. The goal is to prioritize customer engagement in a way that is personalized differently for each person.

Looking to the Future

Intermountain Healthcare and Select Health have several goals for consumer engagement looking to the future. One of the key goals is to keep costs in check for members as much as possible. Another is to provide additional tools in price transparency. We want to make it easy to find the lowest cost care at the highest quality. Transparency has never been more important to the marketplace than it is now.

If you want more information on healthcare benefits, you can reach out to the team at Diversified Insurance Group right here.