Cost Transparency Is Not Enough — Engagement Is Critical
By Tate McDaniel, SVP of Change Healthcare Engagement Solutions
It’s more imperative than ever for health plans and employers to offer not only cost transparency tools, but support them with proactive engagement. Engagement is key to driving utilization of cost transparency and provider search and, thus, cost savings. Recently, the Journal of the American Medical Association did a study on cost transparency and its results. They found that, rather than helping members spend less and save, health spending actually increased for the member populations. The word that was not mentioned? Engagement.
However, in the accompanying editorial, Dr. Kevin Volpp made two crucial points — low rates of engagement affect the savings and the user experience design of the tool affects choices. Health plans and employers need a proactive user engagement strategy that encourages utilization. Proactive engagement offers actions that push members into using the tool. For example, our clients experience a 42 percent lift in sign-ins to our health shopping platform after delivery of a welcome message. Additionally, our health shopping alerts and reminders reach 90 percent of eligible users, who are then six times more likely to shop for care.
By inviting them into the tool this way, members begin forming practical health shopping habits in a platform that they’ll return to again and again when it’s time to make a healthcare decision.
It’s imperative for any health shopping tool to become a trusted source for information. It should be a destination for users, much like they would use a favorite website for shopping or news.
The Savings Will Follow
Smart health shopping is more than sign-ins and registrations. Savings need to occur. We’re seeing clients that are experiencing real savings and results.
In 2013, Change Healthcare partnered with a large IT firm to educate their employees and their families on how to shop smarter for healthcare and save. More than 30,000 members were educated on the cost and quality of healthcare and also significantly reduced their overall costs. Through the help of Change Healthcare and the True View Engagement Platform, the client reduced their annual spend by targeting the areas with the most significant savings opportunities for its population. We worked in partnership with the company to develop a custom engagement strategy to drive 90 percent of their employees to engage in some form of health shopping, with proactive messaging, savings opportunities, and searches. By helping their associates become smarter healthcare consumers, the client generated more than a million dollars in claims-verified savings over a three-year span with potential savings for 67 percent of their total population. Changing behavior takes time and it’s up to engagement companies and the individual clients to encourage and prompt their users.
Health Shoppers Are Built Over Time
Cost transparency is still a relatively new phenomenon. Consumers are not only learning how tools work, but are still discovering the fact they can shop for healthcare at all. It’s not enough just to present costs; that’s self-evident. Quality also needs to be part of the equation. Integrating provider quality ratings will help educate consumers about how high prices do not always equal high quality. It’s important to have user-centered tools optimized with great communication campaigns that prompt members to take action at a specific point with a full understanding of cost and quality.
If the goal is to create smart health shoppers over time, then the solution must include providers across the full continuum of care. A 2015 PricewaterhouseCoopers Health Research Institute Report found nearly one-third of patients were unhappy with how transparent hospitals were in their billing and that 21 percent were not pleased with other aspects of how their hospital billed them.
Cost transparency is only part of the solution. Better cost transparency plus engagement all across the journey is the real opportunity for meaningful change.
About The Author
As SVP of Change Healthcare Engagement Solutions, Tate McDaniel has collaborated with dozens of companies on strategic cost transparency and engagement healthcare solutions and has nearly 20 years’ experience in managing strategic partnerships and leading consultative sales strategies targeting Fortune 500 companies. He joined Change Healthcare in 2009 from SunTrust Bank, where he was director of Business Development for the bank’s corporate institutional division focusing on large corporate investment banking clients. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Georgia and a master’s degree in business administration from Vanderbilt University.