Health Plans and Employers Are Suffering an Onslaught of Point Solutions. Here’s How Digital Health Companies Can Ease Their Pain.

I have had a lot of conversations with payers and employer-sponsored health plans about adopting digital health. While many agree that digital health programs can improve the cost and quality of care for their members, they tell me they’re exhausted by the realities of managing dozens of digital health point solutions and their members are being overwhelmed.

In digital health, a point solution is defined as programs narrow in scope that tackle a single health condition, such as diabetes, congestive heart failure, musculoskeletal, behavioral health, and many others. The list goes on and on. And that’s sort of the problem.

Health problems rarely occur inside a vacuum. Rather, a person’s health – whether it’s high blood sugar or chronic lower back pain – is interconnected. The goal must be to care for the whole person, rather than treat symptoms as if they were occurring in a vacuum. And this is even more true among the most complex, highest-cost consumers who need help the most.

For these reasons, it is not uncommon for organizations to have upwards of 20 point solutions. That means juggling a dozen or more different vendors, all of which will likely have their own branding as well as company-specific technology and workflows for marketing and communicating with members. None of these point solutions talk to each other. It’s like having to buy a different cell phone for each contact. And for the consumer, navigating all the different digital platforms, the log-ins, the various apps – it’s a nightmare.

Payers and employer-sponsored health plans don’t know what to do. Some are pruning their portfolio of digital health programs or looking to a variety of firms to play the coordinator role, but these approaches risk “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

Over the coming decades, we may see the emergence of whole-person digital health platforms that act as single destinations to address all of a family’s health care needs. While that sounds like the logical conclusion to the problem of point solution exhaustion, the work required to make it a reality is unbelievably complicated and likely to take years to emerge. Consumers can’t just wait in the meantime.  And we shouldn’t either.  So, what should leading digital point solutions do today to address this problem?

Here are some best practices that I feel will enable digital health solutions to be embedded and much more easily integrated into any organization’s ecosystem. It’s not easy work, but it’s necessary to remain competitive and useful in an industry increasingly fatigued by complexity.

Make your digital health company more than just a single-point solution.

The following are the five essential elements every digital health company that wants to be more than just a single-point solution must consider when working with a health plan, employer, or other health service provider.

• Users should have a single, uniform brand experience

Payers and employer-sponsored health plans want choices and flexibility. In my conversations with them, they rejoice when they learn a digital program can seamlessly fit into their health ecosystems with the option to re-brand it as their own, effectively unifying the experience for members under one umbrella.

For example, an employer-sponsored health plan can take a diabetes digital health solution and brand it under its preferred company logo and color scheme, rather than the digital health vendor’s brand. With dynamic white labeling, the employer can decide whether to re-brand, keep the brand or even set it up to dynamically change, projecting a brand specific to the user when the user logs on. What’s important is that the digital health solution can enable a consistent and uniform brand identity for the consumer.

• Clinical protocols must align with the organization’s care standards

Healthcare organizations often differ in the policies, clinical protocols or decision trees they use to manage or treat different medical conditions. For example, a condition such as irritable bowel syndrome is defined by a number of symptoms that have many different treatment pathways and interventions. A digital health vendor should be able to align their clinical protocols with the organization’s to manage the condition in the organization’s preferred way to reduce complexity. Digital health vendors who rely exclusively on their own policies make it harder for the healthcare organizations to manage care.

• Digital care should navigate consumers to an organization’s network partners

Rather than operating as a standalone monolith, a digital health program should be able to integrate within the organization’s care network and navigate consumers to the safest, most effective care venue, program, or provider that the organization has selected.

For example, if a woman enrolls in an MSK solution, and through the onboarding evaluation, it’s clear she’s experiencing pelvic pain, the digital health solution should be able to connect the consumer to a women’s health specialist within the plan’s care delivery network or a best in class specialist if none is available.

• Digital products must integrate into the workflow

Payers and employer-sponsored health plans prefer digital health vendors that have designed their programs or products with APIs to smoothly slide into their workflow without any hassles. That’s because every organization has its own portal, data and unique workflow,  evaluations, and assessments for helping members navigate its platform of digital health offerings, which can number in the dozens. The workflow guides members to choose the right health program for their specific needs. APIs also help reduce the number of touchpoints for both the consumer and the plan, for example, by eliminating duplicate health screenings of a consumer.

Overall, APIs allow digital health solutions to be seamlessly integrated with the payer or employer’s portal and navigation system, making it easier to engage with and providing a frictionless experience for both the organization and its members.

• Design marketing programs that minimize the burden on clients

For a digital health program to be successful, it’s essential for payer or employer-sponsored health plan members to be aware of its existence, which requires direct communication. However, clients have diverse needs, and digital health vendors must be adaptable to meet those needs at various levels.

If the organization doesn’t want the digital health vendor to communicate directly with their members, the digital health solution should create a turnkey marketing program and provide it to the client to execute. In my experience, most clients want full-service marketing and communication support as they lack the budget, bandwidth, or skills to do it effectively. In these cases, payers and employers expect the digital health company to drive enrollment and engagement. While building a turnkey marketing platform that delivers across all channels is technically challenging, it’s crucial for digital health vendors that want to enhance product adoption and utilization rates for their clients.

It’s unlikely that a digital health company is going to create a single, all-inclusive integrated healthcare destination with all the disease categories. What they absolutely can do is make it easy for payers and employers to create a cohesive brand with what appears to the consumer as a single unified experience. The investment in integration will pay off in improved engagement and quality of care, which will lead to improved outcomes that will reduce long-term healthcare spending.

Photo: Aleksei Morozov, Getty Images

This post appears through the MedCity Influencers program. Anyone can publish their perspective on business and innovation in healthcare on MedCity News through MedCity Influencers. Click here to find out how.