Health insurer WellPoint Inc. acknowledged Monday that it does a poor job of designing consumer mobile applications, and will work with more experienced companies to improve the usability of applications intended for use by its customers.
WellPoint expects that approximately 30 million people will start signing up for insurance plans in October 2013 under the Affordable Care Act, and it could well lose market share to competing insurers if consumers don’t like its apps. That’s no vain concern – its first mobile application, released last December, was widely panned by Apple Inc. and Google Android consumers – an experience Rickey Tang, vice president, chief architect and chief technology officer at WellPoint, called “humbling.”
Reviewers commenting in Apple’s App Store described it as “worthless,” “horrible,” and “total garbage,” giving it an average of one out of five stars. It fared slightly better in the Google Play app store, where reviewers gave it two out of five stars, but several users complained that it did not work at all.
Speaking Monday at the CITE Conference on consumer technologies in the workplace, Mr.Tang, added, “If they don’t like you, they can switch and they don’t have to wait until October or November.” Employees typically enroll in health plans once per year, but under the Affordable Care Act, individuals will not have to wait to switch insurance.
Mr. Tang acknowledged that WellPoint is not an expert at building wellness apps, diet apps or many of the other apps that consumers want to use. Instead, by working with partners in an open and standard way, he hopes to build an ecosystem of apps that will satisfy that demand. His ability to do that, he said, will impact WellPoint’s bottom line.
WellPoint has decided that the best approach to building mobile apps is to partner with companies that have lots of experience in this area. The company will create application programming interfaces so partners can create applications that can allow customers to access medical data in conjunction with, say, health monitoring or nutritional applications. Tang says the company will keep control of data security, to make sure that member private medical information is not released.
Of the 30 million newly-insured Americans, about 32% will be covered under Medicaid, 45% from the individual exchanges and 23% from their employers, according to two reports from PwC’s Health Research Institute. The newly-insured will be less educated and more likely to be under-employed or unemployed. Mr. Tang said WellPoint expects that mobile devices will be the primary way to reach this demographic, as physical addresses change more frequently for this demographic.
Mr. Tang said while WellPoint is good at crunching data, it is not very good at app design and usability. One shortfall of the first WellPoint app was that it didn’t let users see their claims, according to several reviews in Apple’s app store.
Brian Katz, head of mobile engineering at pharmaceutical company Sanofi S.A. , also speaking at the conference, said companies can avoid building “crapplications” by developing a better understanding of the main tasks users want to accomplish with their mobile apps and making it easy to do those tasks with a minimum of clicks.
Date: June 3, 2013