Payers are watching all around them as the healthcare industry shifts. Digital and mobile health tools are becoming more commonplace, data and analysis are prized and more companies — some of them giant names — are mulling skipping insurers altogether and contracting directly with providers.
These themes dominated the talk at the annual America’s Health Insurance Plans conference in San Diego, along with further embrace of population health measures, market consolidation and a growing need to focus on customer service.
Here’s a round-up of key takeaways.
The elephant in the room
Some of the biggest news to make waves at the conference came before it even began, when Amazon, J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway announced they had chosen the CEO for the company they are forming to address employee healthcare costs.
Their pick, surgery professor and author Atul Gawande, had been booked months earlier to speak about end-of-life care. While he declined to discuss the new role in any detail, he expressed excitement and said he’s up for the challenge. “We will come to a place where we can get scalable solutions that change the practice of medicine anywhere,” he said, adding: “It’s a long road but it clearly is possible.”
Barak Richman, business and law professor at Duke University, said elsewhere at the conference that the buzz from the three companies’ initial announcement told him people are looking toward outside actors to disrupt healthcare. With their previous successes in other industries, Amazon, JPM and BH have a chance to shake up the system. “There’s so much enthusiasm and so much intrigue behind it, even though they haven’t done anything yet,” he said.
The new initiative could still use help from within the existing healthcare infrastructure, however. Emmet O’Gara, EVP of Total Population Management at HMS, told Healthcare Dive his product and others with more niche capabilities might appeal to outside companies that don’t want to reinvent the wheel. He sees an engagement opportunity and the potential to gain by running toward the new company rather than away from it, he said.
Looking to Apple, Netflix as models
Health insurers are becoming painfully aware that new forms of competition require them to put more focus on making patients feel like valued customers.
This shift is coming from a broad move in the industry from wholesale to retail, and from consumer experiences outside of healthcare. People are seeing banks, hotels and myriad other businesses mold an experience exclusively for them, and they’re starting to expect the same from health plans, Kaveh Safavi, senior managing director of Accenture’s global health practice, told Healthcare Dive.
Date: July 24, 2018
Source: Healthcare Dive