Improving health plan member retention

These bulleted comments came from a post about “retention” from the Patient Centric Healthcare blog:

• Retention is a journey from employee satisfaction to customer satisfaction to loyalty and ultimately retention.
• There are many different types of loyalty – price, programmatic, experience, and relationship.  (Forrester Research)
• There are many lessons to be learned from outside the industry on the value of retention, how to measure retention, and what drives it.
• A data centric approach to learning and understanding your consumers is critical path.
• There are some basic programs emerging as foundational.
• Health plans unfortunately start by having to build trust.
• One way to build trust is to demonstrate that you are looking out for the best interest of the patient.
• Your brand is affected by all the constituents in the delivery chain.
• Price and product are the obvious drivers of satisfaction, but there are others.
• The most satisfied are not always those with the lowest price.  (There is a great example of this in another industry.)
• Your healthy members are the most likely to disenroll.
• Satisfaction varies by condition.
• There is a big difference in likelihood to renew between someone that scores you in the top box (i.e., 10 out of 10).

My comments:

 

Retention will naturally occur when you demonstrate value (i.e., a good product, solving problems, having friendly exchanges, a good working environment, and a fair trade of wages for work). I’m not sure that’s a journey from this, then to this, then to that.

 

Why is it unfortunate that health plans have to start by building trust? We all have to do that. If a customer comes to you for information about your products, you have to build trust. Why should health plans be any different?

 

Healthy members disenroll from health plans faster than sick ones because health plans ignore the healthy ones. They focus on the sick ones. For a healthy member, a health plan is just a huge debit from his or her paycheck or checking account each month—and that’s it. The last thing a health plan should do is prove to “patients” that they are looking out for their interests. No. “Patients” are expensive. A health plan should prove to members who are not patients that they are looking out for their interests. That’s where the money is. The health plan that learns to create the best “unpatient” satisfaction will win.

 

When you talk about raising satisfaction among health plan members, you better be clear on the implications. The most satisfied health plan members are those with the highest claims. I can prove this.

 

Satisfaction varies by conditions. So what do health plans do to increase diabetes satisfaction versus congestive heart failure satisfaction? How about focusing on the people first?

 

Data centric? I thought this health blog was “patient centric”? A data centric approach to improving customer loyalty is only as valuable as its ability to tell you how to meet the customer’s health values and priorities now and into the future. The danger of becoming data centric is that you might stop being patient centric.

What’s behind the U.S. health care crisis

 

All kinds of very smart people are coming up with really neat and fancy ways to address the U.S. health care crisis. Some focus on reducing the growth of health care costs. Some focus on improving efficiency. Some (like Hillary or Barrack) want some form of nationalized health care. I’m not going to mention any more because they’re already getting plenty of press.  Want I’m going to say instead is that the one BIG solution to the nation’s health care crisis that they are all missing is to just change the way we think.

 

Here’s what I mean: I’ve analyzed thousands of health plan member’s claims rates and tied them to patterns of behavior driven by predictable patterns of health care priorities and attitudes. The health priority patterns I’ve identified vary in both shape and size, but they’re all over the country and reveal spreads in health care spending in the neighborhood of $227 billion (yes, billion!) dollars in health care spending every year. 

 

The big problem (and the one I’m focused on solving) is that there is no awareness of this HUGE force shaping health care spending. All the smart people in the country working to solve our health care dilemma DO NOT KNOW they are missing a big, big piece. But, it’s not their fault. The psychological dynamic I’m describing is hard to see–really hard! It’s not at all obvious because it is behind our eyes, not in front of them.  So it is really hard for most people to see because they are looking out–instead of looking in.