Dan Prince

We like to think that we live in a consumer-driven economy.  And we do, mostly.  However, one area where the consumer-driven portion is lagging is health insurance.  That’s about to change.

Employees at companies usually just accept the insurance their employers offer.  Even in large organizations which offer a couple of different carriers and plans, the choices are limited and pretty easy for employees to sort out.

However, people who have to shop on the open market for individual health insurance know that the process of picking a health plan is often complex and time-consuming, fraught with language and concepts that are unwieldy.

Of course, “complexity” to some spells “opportunity” for others.  New consumer-facing businesses are popping up to serve in the “navigator” and “advisor” role to individuals and to small businesses who want to make the best decision possible when it comes to buying health insurance. 

One such example is Bernard Health, a health insurance brokerage company that specializes in helping small to medium sized businesses and individuals navigate the complicated world of health insurance and health savings plans.  Their team will advise you on buying health insurance, whether it’s picking a plan for 18 employees or choosing among the various Medicare options.

According to company founder Alex Tolbert, “Eighty to 90 percent of people do not have the most optimal policy in place.”  For example, a person nearing retirement may have several options for health insurance: stay on their employer’s policy, enroll in original Medicare, accept Medicare and buy a Supplement, or join a Medicare Advantage plan.  Bernard advisors make recommendations and help customers weigh the costs and benefits of each plan.  The usual commission paid from the insurance carrier to a broker goes to Bernard’s corporate offices and never trickles down to the individual advisor, which Tolbert believes helps the advisors stay objective. 

Expect to see more store fronts with “Bernard Health” over the door.  Currently, there are two stores in Nashville and a third opening in the Cool Springs area this spring.  They also have a store in Indianapolis and one in Columbus, Ohio, with more coming soon.

A Bernard Health store with a sign out front is a sign of the times.  Like traditional insurance brokers who have served mostly businesses, companies like Bernard Health are helping individual consumers navigate the choppy waters of health insurance.

Dan Prince

The move to retail is on—in a new way.   BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee has announced it is looking in the Nashville area for its first retail store location. BCBS of Tennessee joins other health insurers across the country that have opened retail stores in recent years, including Blue Shield of California, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield in Pittsburgh, Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina, and Humana.

Shopping for Health Insurance

What’s driving this move toward retail? Healthcare reform for one thing. In 2014, when state insurance exchanges are scheduled to be up and running, millions of additional consumers are expected to shop for their own health insurance. “We need to reach our members in ways that are meaningful and convenient for them, and that is what we are doing by looking at a retail presence,” said Roy Vaughn for BlueCross.

Buy Your Health Insurance, Here

BCBS isn’t the first plan to open a retail location in Tennessee. Last fall, UnitedHealthcare opened a storefront at a Kingsport mall to help seniors and others navigate the annual Medicare sign-up process. United is also unveiling health benefits stores that offer customer service, health education and other support. Because health insurance can be confusing and more people are buying insurance on their own, these plans see retail as a way to build brand and develop direct relationships with consumers.

Service with a Smile

Each store is a little different. Some have self-serve kiosks for those who like to “DIY.” Others have private cubicles where potential customers can talk with salespeople. Amenities include everything from kids’ play areas to juice bars to space for classes and other wellness–related activities. Most of the stores have a registered nurse to help sort out information on pending treatment decisions. But all have one thing in common – face-to-face interaction with a real person.

The Ultimate Win-Win

With consumers taking a more active role in their healthcare – and footing a bigger percentage of the cost – retail locations make good sense. The direct connection lets insurers target their marketing to specific groups like women and seniors. And the dialogue goes both ways. A community of engaged, active plan members offers marketing and customer service staff alike an express window into the patient experience.

Dan Prince

Health literacy is a problem that confronts nurses, doctors and hospital staff every day. It’s going to be an even bigger problem for healthcare professionals when millions of currently uninsured Americans flood into the system in 2014.

But the organizations that may feel the most pain when the floodgates open are the health plans. I’ve been reading about how they are preparing for the change, and I’m concerned that insurers may be focusing too narrowly – and cutting a few too many corners.

What is “health literacy?”

The US Department of Health and Human Services defines health literacy as “the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.” People with low health literacy are less likely to know what healthy behaviors are and to adopt them.

In testimony Susan Pisano of AHIP (America’s Health Insurance Plans) presented in July 2011 at the Institute of Medicine’s Health Literacy Roundtable Meeting, she said 9 in 10 Americans have “difficulty using health information to make informed decisions about their health, profoundly affecting their health and access to care.” And profoundly impacting their interactions with the companies processing payments for their care.

Health plans’ efforts to raise health literacy

Ms. Pisano’s testimony was about AHIP’s efforts to assist health plans in addressing and improving health insurance literacy.

Health insurers see more and more clearly the writing on the wall for their companies. AHIP conducts health plan surveys every two years on disparities in health, and one of the topics covered is health literacy. Their 2008 study showed 69% of plans had introduced some components of a health literacy program. Two years later, in 2010, this was up to 83%.

A big focus of AHIP’s effort is to assure that the reading level of materials is low enough and the language is plain enough. A little aside here, I have to mention as the head of a healthcare research company: Pisano said consumer testing of materials was an important priority, but that many companies were skipping it, instead testing materials on their own employees who seem similar to the target audience. As a research company, we can, of course, point out all kinds of flaws with this approach, starting with the fact that employees who work in almost any part of a health insurance company are likely to be more health and health insurance literate because of where they work. But the biggest threat to the reliability of this kind of research is the fact that these employees already have health insurance benefits and have dealt with the system as customers. They really can’t stand in for people who haven’t.

Health literacy is about more than reading

Another concern Ms. Pisano’s testimony raised for me was the almost exclusive focus on “materials.” A 2004 study by Dean Schillinger, Andrew Bindman, Frances Wang et al. on “Functional Health Literacy and the Quality of Physician-Patient Communication Among Diabetes Patients” showed that health literacy isn’t just a “reading” issue. It profoundly affects how well people understand verbal explanations and follow instructions they get in face to face or phone encounters.

Schillinger et al. were thinking about doctors’ and nurses’ encounters with patients in offices, clinics and hospitals, but health literacy colors people’s experience of every part of the healthcare system. The implications are very clear for health insurers.

Health plans need to be preparing front-line service people to ascertain the level of the customer’s health literacy and adjust their vocabulary, their pace, their tone and possibly the language they’re speaking in – to fit the need.

As millions of people open their first EOBs ever in 2014, the phone banks will be lighting up. Health plans who step up to the health literacy challenge now will be the winners – or at least the survivors.

Seize the opportunity

There’s an opportunity here as well as a threat. I hope that health insurers, along with the rest of the healthcare system, will see the opportunities in the 2014 challenge. In addition to bracing themselves for millions of customers with even less health literacy than their current customers, they should be doing what they can to increase Americans’ health literacy across the board.

What do you think? How is your company getting ready to deal with customers who have little to no experience with the healthcare system? And let me know what your company is doing to increase customers’ health literacy. Comment on this post or send me an email at dan.prince@catalysthcr.com.

Dan Prince

Healthcare Reform opens up whole new vistas for improving the customer experience, but if the story I am about to share with you is any indication, the horizon is far, far away when it comes to individual health insurance.

One of our part-time employees, Becky Clark, recently undertook an odyssey with her husband – they needed to buy individual health insurance for their family because Heath was going out on his own as a healthcare attorney.

What they experienced as young and healthy buyers is sobering as the nation gets ready for millions of people to purchase individual health insurance through the exchanges envisioned by the Healthcare Reform.

I’ll let Becky take it from here:

Even though we both work in healthcare – and I deal with a wide variety of patient satisfaction research on a continuing basis — we were unprepared for the experience of buying individual insurance.

Becky Clark

Our goal was to spend $500 or less a month for our family of four. We dealt with a broker, an insurance company and an association. The initial process of getting a quote wasn’t bad — the only questions they asked were: Age, gender and smoke/not smoke. But that was only the beginning of what was mostly a very frustrating customer experience.

The broker

We went to see a broker for one of the largest insurers in the state and got initial monthly quotes ranging from $400 to over $1,000, depending on the nature of the policies. The only reasonably priced policies were high deductible HSAs, so we applied for a $7500 deductible HSA.

We applied online – and the application process was intense and violating. There was a checklist of at least 50 questions regarding medical conditions or illnesses. If we had ever been treated for one, we had to go deeper for a detailed explanation.

We had to recall all doctor visits over the past 5 years and all conditions we’ve ever been treated for in our lives, how long we were treated, the physician that treated us, his/her location, and whether or not the condition was resolved. We also had to list all medications taken over past 10 years and why.

This may sound like a simple process to some, and we thought it would be easy to recall all this information, but it took hours! And we are very healthy people. We both are at or below ideal weight, exercise on a regular basis, eat well, don’t smoke, enjoy a glass or two of wine, have no chronic conditions and have no serious family history going against us. We have a pretty boring medical history – which is good!

But our son was scheduled for a procedure once he reached 6 months of age. Even though doctors told us that once the procedure was done, the problem should be taken care of and even though it is by no means a chronic issue, it still raised a red flag. This particular insurance company raised his rate 300%.

I called to ask why, and they said that with the changes brought by healthcare reform, children could not be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions. Since they had to cover this “condition,” the price of the policy was raised by a few hundred dollars a month.

And can I just say that I heard back from this company the next day with the increased rate. They did not take the time to look at medical records or ask any questions. Just a simple increase of 300%.

The insurance company

So I forgot to mention that when shopping for individual health insurance, you have to decide if you want maternity coverage or not. Don’t all plans provided through an employer offer maternity coverage – no matter what?

We are pretty sure that we are done having kids … but no permanent measures have been taken to prevent that. Human error is always possible. When my husband’s cousin unexpectedly became pregnant, we learned that they, too, had individual health insurance and elected not to get the maternity coverage. They, too, thought they were done having kids. So we decided to opt for the maternity coverage, which of course, is much more expensive.

We had begun to explore purchasing coverage directly from another insurance company. But with the decision about maternity benefits, this was no longer an option. They didn’t offer maternity benefits
So yet again, we were forced to keep shopping.

The association

Our journey took us next to a trade association that offered coverage partially administered by the same insurance company represented by the broker. Got that?

Even though the insurance company administered the plans offered by the trade association, the offerings themselves were different and the trade association did its own underwriting. The good news: maternity benefits could be included.

There were five different plan options, and different deductibles within each plan. I was extremely impressed with many of the offerings. The plan that we applied for actually had everything I would want: it’s a PPO, fairly low deductible, good coverage, dental and vision. Wow! I thought it was too good to be true – and it was reasonably priced, according to the quote. So this was the plan we wanted and we were extremely anxious while waiting for the underwriters.

The final application we completed was on paper and mailed to their corporate office. We waited three to four weeks to hear back. They requested my son’s medical records, which we provided in a timely manner. They actually took time to review medical records — not just see a scheduled procedure and immediately respond by jacking up the rates.

At one point, I called to check the status of our application, and they were able to tell me that two underwriters review the application. One underwriter had signed off on it and they were waiting for the second to review it. I was really impressed that they were able to provide me with that information.

So another week went by and we received notice in the mail that we were approved for their policy. They raised our rate because of our son, but it was only about $50 a month. And they listed two other heath issues with our kids that raised concerns, so I’m sure those were included in the $50 increase. They excluded chiropractic care for me, which no other underwriters did. I hadn’t been to the chiropractor in over a year, but I had gone maybe once a month for the previous few years just to keep my back comfortable with running and because hauling around two kids all the time takes a toll on the back.

I can’t tell you how relieved we are to have a policy that includes all we want, with a reasonable deductible, and that costs under $500 a month.

What I learned about the customer experience

But even with that good result, our total customer experience was frustrating:

• The overall process is a mystery to my husband and me, even with our healthcare backgrounds. You call up a company, get an immediate quote based on age, gender and smoking, then you are to use that information to decide if you want to invest the time and energy in their application process. And it’s just a quote – more than likely, it won’t be that low!

• Maternity coverage should not be an issue. No one should have to fret and worry about health insurance if they find themselves pregnant. (There are other reasons to panic about pregnancy – this should not be one of them!)

• There is obviously a huge discrepancy between obtaining health insurance individually versus through an employer. Employers never ask if you smoke or are overweight or have chronic issues or if you took this medication 10 years ago. I suspect over half the employees in this country would not qualify for individual health insurance, and if they did, it would not be affordable.

• The link between health insurance and employment status is frustrating. My husband started his own law firm – a small business. While starting your own business is wonderful, health insurance has been the biggest barrier. I don’t know how many times we thought – “OK, at what price point do we go close up and go back to corporate employment?” The cost of health insurance should not be the barrier that it is to self-employment. Efforts should be focused on business development and client work, not shopping and paying for health insurance, especially when your business model is no work; no pay.

• There is still much work to be done by insurance plans to improve the customer experience. The differences between how we were treated by the first company we checked with and the one we ultimately chose are ample evidence of that.

Dan Prince

If a hospital or healthcare system decides to install a “chief experience officer,” what would this person actually do?

Several of the presentations at the recent Association for Patient Experience conference hosted by the Cleveland Clinic focused on this exact question.

A Forrester Research study of about 150 “chief customer officers” at a variety of organizations across the country led to a “job description” that included these roles:

• Developing a clear understanding of the organizations’ customers, and their wants, needs, and desires
• Acting as the customer’s “chief advocate,” in order to be their champion in conversations with management and internal staff
• Breaking down customary silos within a company to promote cross-functional improvements that stick
• Defining customer metrics, to be sure that measurements tie to things that really matter to the business and the customer
• Demonstrating financial impact, so that others in the organization, including senior leadership, will lend their support to cultural change and tactical improvements

Three broad definitions of roles

Another perspective came from Anthony Cirillo, a healthcare consultant who many credit with coining the term “chief experience officer.”

He outlined three “broader” roles that an effective experience director must implement to be effective:

–Chief Promise Keeper, which I took to mean the person in the organization, who along with marketing, makes sure that the organization is living up to its promise of being patient-centric, and being the one to point out to others when it is not (i.e., when staff walk by trash on the floor and don’t bend over and pick it up).

–Chief Healing Officer, which I understood to mean healing in its broadest sense. This role might include supporting efforts to introduce (or use more widely) music and art therapy, or redesigning the process for the orientation of new employees, so all staff see themselves as “caregivers.”

–Chief Context Setter. This idea was more abstract for me, but I think it points to the notion of being sure that managers and teams within a healthcare setting look at the full context of delivering patient-centered healthcare. For example, it could mean asking what do our valet parking attendants say to the departing cancer patient who no longer has hair? How good a job is the hospital doing in terms of signage that is both welcoming and instructive? Can bills be simplified to make them more understandable to patients? In other words, it suggests looking at the context in which the actual delivery of clinical care happens.

A recent study that we did for The Beryl Institute found that about one in 10 hospitals or systems in the U.S. have assigned accountability for patient experience to a specific person and that person has the word “experience” as part of his or her job title.

We are on the front edge of taking the new concept of a “chief customer officer” and applying it in provider settings. It’s an exciting move … and a potentially game-changing movement for American healthcare!