How a consumer-first approach will change benefits
My experience as a young patient led me to spend nearly two decades in the employee benefits space. What I’ve seen over that time is an industry that’s failed to meaningfully serve consumers.
When I was nine, doctors diagnosed me with a brain tumor. Thankfully, it wasn’t cancerous, but it did knock out a crucial valve that I needed to release pressure on my brain. I’ve needed an artificial valve, called a shunt, ever since. Between brain surgeries, MRIs, new doctors, and unexpected medical bills, I can tell you firsthand that our system is far too complex.
My experience as a young patient led me to spend nearly two decades in the employee benefits space. What I’ve seen over that time is an industry that’s failed to meaningfully serve consumers.
Why is it broken?
Costs continue to increase at an unsustainable rate. Our highly complex system lacks transparency in both cost and quality. In an effort to curb this trend and push better access and decisions, our industry continues to roll out more programs, point solutions, and “game-changing” strategies. While intentions are mostly good, instead of solving problems, this never-ending cycle creates additional struggles with employee education and engagement.
As employees continue to get flooded with new solutions, actual employee awareness and adoption remains low. As the president and CEO of the National Business Group on Health said in a recent interview, “What keeps employers up at night is engagement.” But if you think about it, are we really setting ourselves up for success?
As consumers, we expect technology to work for us and support us in our daily life. At the very least, we expect ease of use, centralization and personalization.
While most industries have completely transformed over the years to reflect these expectations, our industry remains stuck. The reality of benefits delivery remains the complicated navigation of a maze of phone numbers and websites. That doesn’t even include the 5,10, or 20+ apps an employee likely also needs to download. To make things worse, few if any of these solutions are connected or share information. And none provide a holistic personal benefits experience that puts the needs of the employee and the entire, connected benefit package at the forefront.
If Uber, Netflix, and Amazon can fundamentally transform their industries to produce unprecedented results, what’s holding us back? As Steve Jobs warned back in 1997, “You’ve gotta start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology.” This is why I’ve come to believe we have to adopt a consumer-first approach.
Why we need to change
The benefits industry has lagged in technological innovation, though not from a lack of effort. Insurance companies, ben admins and point solutions have been consistently putting out technology for a while now. However, most of these solutions were focused on making HR’s job easier, and forgot to put the end-user at the center. The issue, I’d argue, is that we haven’t heeded Steve Jobs’ advice. Rather than starting with consumer-first solutions in our space, we’re built to solve an employer’s problem first. Based on the transformations we’ve seen in other industries, that’s a fundamental issue.
Related: 10 tips on innovation and disruption
We’ll never influence behavior enough to drive engagement unless we create a frictionless experience. Take telemedicine, for example. It’s a great resource, but famously underutilized because our industry hasn’t set this solution up to succeed. Access to telemedicine is usually buried in a booklet or portal, far from where actual decisions take place. The intake process is a pain and copays are less attractive than alternatives. There’s simply too much friction.
There’s a difference between offering solutions and delivering them to your employees, and that difference means focusing on a consumer-first approach.
Building a better benefits experience
I’ll be the first to admit that creating a consumer-first experience is easier said than done. The benefits space is fractured by benefits that don’t work well together and aren’t approachable on their own. In order to put the consumer first, we need to create an experience that’s familiar, intuitive and comfortable.
The average American spends 3 hours and 43 minutes on their mobile devices daily. To put the consumer first, it’s clear we need embrace this mobile-first approach and create a digital consumer experience that puts your entire benefits package in a single place, no matter how many benefits, solutions, or strategies are offered. This approach has clear advantages:
Centralization
A centralized experience can serve as the door to engage employees in the moments they are searching for care. Employees no longer have to spend stressful moments looking for where to go and what to do.
Navigation
The consumer-first approach has to make navigation simpler. All the education in the world isn’t going to make your employees experts in the health care system. What they need is support. They should be able to access on-demand assistance both before receiving health service and afterwards. Help should be available via chat and voice, since the release of the iPhone has created a huge cultural shift away from phone calls in the last decade.
Communication and education
One of our biggest barriers to utilization is awareness. HR teams need to continuously poke and prod employees to get them to utilize technology, but this is often an uphill battle. When benefits live in a single hub, communication efforts can be automated and effectively drive traffic back to every single benefit.
Our industry needs to adopt solutions that put the employee experience first. We need to make it easy for employees to make better health care decisions without becoming health care experts. I believe that 2020 will be the year that benefits experience platforms become mainstream and part of all plan designs.
A consumer-first approach changes everything
I consider myself pretty knowledgeable in the benefits space, but my experience is no match for the complexity of our system. While managing my condition throughout the years, I’ve been hit with surprise bills from an out-of-network anesthesiologist, the challenge of choosing a new surgeon in a new city, or learning how MRIs are priced when I selected my first HDHP.
I still imagine how different navigating the health care system might have been if I’d had a streamlined, supportive benefits experience throughout my life. Our space has failed consumers on this front. As health care costs rise and more point solutions pop up, we need innovation more than ever. Employees really are dealing with life-and-death scenarios. Putting their experience at the forefront of our solutions is the first step toward true innovation.
Mark Baemmert is the VP Sales at HealthJoy.