Dan Prince

My colleague Karen Stone, Vice President of Marketing at Catalyst Healthcare Research, recently attended the American Health Insurance Plans conference, where there was much talk about how to engage consumers with the impending arrival of healthcare exchanges. Here is her report:

The Internet has revolutionized the way we shop. Online comparison shopping is now a national pastime. Want a new car, take a spin on Auto Trader or cargurus.com. Need a new kitchen appliance, check out your options on Amazon. Booking travel, visit Travelocity or Orbitz to find the best deal. Going out to eat, get recommendations and ratings on Foursquare and Yelp. There’s no way around it, the consumer shopping experience has changed forever. While the retail industry has made great strides toward conquering the cyber-shopping curve, the healthcare industry is just now waking up to this reality.

Health plans, in particular, are facing extreme uncertainty and market pressure to engage consumers in order to satisfy requirements of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. With a 2014 deadline looming for states to implement government-mandated healthcare exchanges, many health plans are scrambling to figure out how to reorganize, repackage and reposition themselves to compete in the online world.

I was reminded of this fact recently while attending the American Health Insurance Plans conference in San Francisco where leaders from all over the country gathered to talk about the coming market disruption, share ideas (and concerns) and receive inspiration for moving forward.

One of the recurring themes discussed at AHIP was the need for health plans to begin to track, analyze and report customer experience data in a way that drives sales as other industries have done. In the new exchange environment, customer experience will likely become a key differentiator as consumers utilize star ratings and social media (think Travelocity) to offer feedback about their provider of choice. In fact, some health plan executives predict that social media may emerge as one of the most powerful drivers of customer decision-making.

To drive online conversation and conversion, understanding and influencing critical touch points all along the customer experience continuum will be critical. With 30+ million people set to join, health plans must start paying more attention to the member portal than the provider portal. Health plans wanting to differentiate and capture the most market share need to create an online experience modeled after sites existing in the retail world – easy to navigate web material, online chat, FAQs, online enrollment, quick turnaround on ID cards and mobile support.

To compete effectively, health plans must move forward with deliberate intention, finding their point of differentiation and giving customers a reason to talk positively about them with each interaction. They must track the wants and needs of customers in new ways, discover and leverage all possible distribution channels, enable technology to enroll people quickly and easily, consistently measure the ROI of their efforts, and make each and every interaction with their customers count! And the clock is ticking – 2014 is closer than we think!