In the healthcare market, players that diversify how consumers are engaged will improve the way patients experience and participate in their own care, select health insurance benefit options, and utilise the care delivery system.
This is among the finding from an new IDC Health Insights report, Engaging Consumers in a Post-Health Reform Market, designed to help payers effectively reach and engage their various member populations segments.
Analyst Deanne Kasim outlines the key considerations, strategies and tools available and offers best practices from the retail industry as reference.
In a post-health reform environment, payers must develop new strategies to obtain and maximize the attention, interest and loyalty of a new group of consumers from the individual policy marketplace, she says.
Successful and meaningful consumer engagement requires a holistic approach to the patient’s needs, including financial and behavioural needs. It requires a systems approach to the decisions facing the consumer in terms of what benefit services are purchased and how the entire insurance system is navigated.
Payers are beginning to adjust their health IT expenditures accordingly. According to the IDC Health Insights Perspective: Healthcare Payer – Analytics Investment 2013 and a 2014 Top 5 Preview, consumer engagement will once again represent a leading priority for analytics investments for 2014. Health plans will continue aggressive investments across a broad spectrum of technologies and solutions.
In addition, 36% of health plans surveyed in IDC Health Insights’ Healthcare Payer Technology and Business Investment Survey indicated they had appointed a chief consumer communication or engagement officer.
Key highlights of the new report include:
* Consumer engagement practices and IT tools in the payer market are still in the early stages of maturity compared to the more sophisticated marketing and communication practices, analytics, Web-based and mobile tools of the retail industry.
* While focusing on the individual consumer as a growing market niche, payers still need to collaborate with employers, who are still searching for an effective combination of benefit program design and incentives to deliver improved and sustainable health outcomes.
* Completely understanding the key demographic, health literacy, economic and other key differences between consumer segments is a mandatory requirement for any successful payer organisation.
* Payers need to utilise the comprehensive resources of their marketing, strategic planning, consumer engagement, and other appropriate departments to develop effective strategies and outreach efforts to target and engage growing and evolving consumer groups of Medicaid and Medicare Advantage recipients, public health insurance marketplace enrolees, special needs and other carve out plans, and small employers.
* Analytical tools providing a comprehensive map of the consumer journey in navigating the health benefit system are critical for successful payer managers.
* Payer organisations need to learn best practices from the retail industry. For example, the next generation of payer mobile applications should tie into CRM applications and analytics to know more about how consumers are using these tools, and what information they are finding to be most beneficial. More meaningful content and functionality can be built into mobile applications with this analysis information.
Kasim says: “The shift to a more consumer-centric model has been a difficult transition for many payers who have long-standing traditions of the business-to-business model of insurance. Payers that diversify how consumers are engaged will ultimately improve the way patients experience and participate in their own care, select health insurance benefit options, and utilize the care delivery system.
“An effective combination of a thoughtful, all-inclusive consumer messaging platform and an effective communications campaign can be supported by a mix of traditional Web-based and newer mobile-based IT applications.”
