Let’s face it. Health insurers have been notoriously bad at creating a positive customer experience.
(As a side note, we had a great conversation about this during last night’s #hcpt tweet chat on healthcare price transparency.)
But as the industry shifts from one that’s primarily B2B to one that’s increasingly B2C, insurers are putting more focus on engaging with customers where they already are. This summer, health rewards company EveryMove began publishing a quarterly ranking of health insurance plans based on “how well they are using technology to engage the consumer” through social, mobile, web, customer service and member perception.
EveryMove pointed out a few prominent trends it’s noticed over the past few months: webpage redesigns, increased investment in social and mobile, and community involvement.
Its top-ranked plan, Cigna, launched an ad campaign called GO YOU back in 2011. It’s accrued nearly 550,000 likes on its Facebook page and lots of engagement with the empowering images and videos it shares. It also awards thousands of dollars in grants each year to leaders of health-related charities, with the winners partially determined by public voting on Facebook. In September, the insurer revealed that as part of the campaign, it’s working on creating a mobile health app marketplace that will help customers navigate through the thousands of health and lifestyle apps out there to find the best ones for them.
Also in Q3 of this year, Humana, which ranked fourth on EveryMove’s list, rolled out a four-week challenge called My Well-Being that presents users with fitness videos, recipes and tips to encourage them to establish healthy eating and exercise habits.
Smaller companies are making progress, too. LifeWise Health Plan of Washington, for example, hosted a series of six free, local events focused on fitness. Participants were encouraged to keep the conversation going using the Twitter hashtag #FitMob.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
EveryMove says it ranks insurers based on more than 50 data points that represent indicators like how mobile-friendly they are, what kind of self-service tools and incentives they’re providing and commitment to social engagement.
[Image credit: Cigna Go You]
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