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Consumer Engagement

We work with our health plan clients to build the right mix of processes and technology to create real consumer-centricity

Consumer Engagement

We define the health plan consumer as anyone who is a member today, has been a member in the past, or could be a member in the future. This straightforward point of view helps us assist our clients with building foundational and tactical approaches to engaging consumers that differentiates them from their competitors.

    Effective consumer engagement is critical to success in today’s healthcare environment. It is essential to achieving objectives across traditional sales and marketing functions and, increasingly, it is also a critical tool in enabling value-based care, risk management, care management and quality improvement programs.

    While the program-level business value of successful engagement is clear and compelling, pursuing individual engagement strategies independently, without cross-program orchestration, has the potential to over-saturate individuals and alienate them with irrelevant, redundant, conflicting or unwelcome messaging. Now more than ever, an integrated, holistic engagement approach designed and orchestrated around consumer needs and expectations, is the path forward for the modern health plan.

    We know consumer-centric engagement strategy, and we know consumer engagement technology. The Baker Tilly solution framework brings these areas together to help you build a sustainable, constantly improving consumer engagement capability that can be deployed in support of all of your critical programs, while delivering a positive and relevant experience for individuals. Any technology platform, any set of vendor relationships ... our framework brings the pieces together to accelerate your path to better performance.

    Acquire, manage and organize individual-level data

    Assembling and managing existing and new types of data is the basis for enabling meaningful engagement

    Many health plans don’t have a consistent or comprehensive view of their consumers. Even the most data-savvy health plans may not have the infrastructure or processes in place to manage data about their members and prospects in a way to support consumer-centric engagement strategies. For example, they may not have an identity management solution to track individuals over time, they may not keep track of historical individual attributes, or they may not capture interaction history.

    How we can help

    • Health care data integration – bring together data from disparate clinical, operational, engagement and consumer sources - internal and external
    • Member and patient data mastering – resolve complex identity issues across a wide variety of disparate data sources, including membership and claims, EMR systems, member engagement platforms, and care management systems
    • Centralized consumer engagement data structure – design and build custom foundational data structures needed to support analytics and engagement platforms
    • Solution approach definition – comprehensive solution design and data management vendor assessment and recommendations

    Build meaningful insights about individuals

    Turning data into insights to enable deeper understanding and prediction of consumer behavior

    We often find our clients in situations where they have deep expertise in and a significant library of, membership, claims and clinical interaction data, but a much shorter inventory of historical and current engagement information and consumer (non-member) insights. Building and consistently refining models to identify and predict behaviors and attitudes of members and prospects is critical to driving meaningful interactions with consumers that both improve organizational performance and population health.

    How we can help

    • Consumer segmentation – design and build a wide variety of segmentation models, from basic cluster analysis through multidimensional micro-segmentation
    • Attitudinal and behavioral analytics – develop both descriptive and predictive models to define traits like loyalty and likelihood to manage health
    • Classic marketing analytics – design and build models to support marketing and engagement effectiveness improvement, including response, conversion, frequency and channel preference modeling
    • Social determinants modeling analytics – define required data and research and build models to predict barriers to care and attitudinal contributors to purchasing and care seeking behaviors
    • Solution approach definition – comprehensive solution design and analytics technology vendor assessment and recommendations

    Integrate and align processes and systems

    Operationalize individual-level insight to enable consumer interaction systems

    Most health plans acknowledge that the shift from traditional B2B sales, marketing and product design is occurring, and have begun to adapt their business processes and capabilities to a consumer-centric model. Many health plans have made meaningful progress when it comes to specific consumer engagement tactics for health management programs and insurance education – such as deploying new communication channels and creating more interactive and responsive service options.

    Where many organizations are still struggling, however, is in bringing all of these processes and systems together to support better end-to-end consumer engagement – moving away from individual, business unit strategies that have been established in the recent rush to improve individual engagement towards a holistic consumer experience centered view.

    How we can help

    • Engagement systems integration – build the processes and systems required to drive insights and analytics into marketing and member engagement platforms with the objective of making them usable within a wide variety of interaction situations
    • Real-time analytics/next best action – build systems and processes that enable inbound and outbound systems to execute in real or near-real time, and for these actions to be captured and stored for continuous improvement
    • Solution approach definition – comprehensive solution design and engagement platform vendor assessment and recommendations

    Develop and manage content and assets

    Establishing a library of modularized content and assets to support just-in-time personalized engagement

    Perhaps as important as having insights on an individual is the ability to pull assets “off the shelf” that can be personalized to the unique circumstances of that individual. The curation of audience specific materials requires a significant level of effort. Asset development is typically either relegated to a pre-defined, rigid structure that serves only one defined path of engagement, or is developed on-the-fly as iterations of a planned campaign are executed.

    Having the assets necessary to support all planned and dynamic interactions requires that they be constructed in a modular way so they can be packaged to address each circumstance and individual as they engage in their journey.

    How we can help

    • Content management systems – design and implement vended content management systems, or design and build custom business processes and systems to enable catalog creation, dynamic content creation and personalization of engagement assets
    • Centralized access to digital engagement assets – design and build integration (batch and real time) between content management systems and the engagement systems that need them
    • Solution approach definition – comprehensive solution design and content management vendor assessment and recommendations

    Interact with consumers at the right time, with the right message, via the right channel

    Using individual customer insights and channel orchestration to connect with consumers in a meaningful way to drive results

    Channel technology alone is not the answer. Our clients are increasingly in search of ways to orchestrate consumer engagement across the variety of communication channels they’ve built, bought or inherited. Mastering the basics of core, highly-utilized channels and providing consistent, accurate and applicable communications is far more impactful than delivering multi-channel, always-on communications that don’t resonate and aren’t “aware” of previous interactions.

    While many health plans have mastered the basics of orchestrating a static engagement approach, the effort to advance to an individualized “next best action” strategy in a meaningful and data driven way is significant.

    How we can help

    • Channel, message and segmentation effectiveness – assess the impact and performance of current channels, messages and segment strategy – and design incremental or holistic strategies for improvement
    • Message, channel, segment preference, and next best action – design and implement analytics- driven campaigns and programs that are capable of using interaction data from previous inbound or outbound communications and output of predictive models to drive a “smart” and immediate next action
    • Member experience design – design and support execution of consumer-centric experiences to include channel and message definition, interaction frequency, feedback loop requirements and system integrations to deliver desired end-state experience
    • Consumer engagement roadmap – build proactive plans across all consumer interaction points to ensure experience objectives and message and channel strategies are aligned

    Optimize overall engagement performance

    Master continuous improvement

    The ability to deliver on financial, population health and member satisfaction metrics is critical for health plans today. Our clients are increasingly striving to develop new consumer experiences and interaction strategies that enable traditional sales, marketing and service initiative as well as key programs like value-based care, quality and care management. All while continuously evolving to meet the changing needs and expectations of consumers. A well-organized and ongoing approach to engagement program monitoring and optimization is critical to success.

    How we can help

    • Channel attribution model development and monitoring – build, deploy and continually monitor performance of individual channels and their contribution to existing and new attribution model(s).
    • Emerging channel evaluation and recommendations – as new channels become available or warrant exploration, evaluate their role in the overall engagement strategy and support implementation and integration of selected new channels.
    • Marketing governance and communication sequencing and prioritization – establish program objectives and design program parameters and processes.
    • Campaign optimization – design and implement vended software solutions, or design and build custom systems and processes to optimize executions across the portfolio of consumer engagement initiatives.

    Consumer engagement strategy development and implementation support

    Multiple competing business, clinical and consumer experience objectives can often create challenges in executing a truly consumer-centric program. A comprehensive strategy that places emphasis on continually measuring results, evolving your insights, and frequently refining your engagement initiatives is key.

    In addition to supporting our clients in mission-critical engagement capability development, our practice can also support your organization in establishing and nurturing a comprehensive consumer engagement program, across a wide variety of strategic and technical needs. Our seasoned healthcare and consumer engagement practitioners can work with you to deliver successful:

    • Strategy Alignment: Validate and refine current strategy and capabilities to align and prioritize consumer engagement objectives, across competing functions and organizational needs.
    • Journey Mapping: Develop true consumer-centric journey maps, spanning critical interactions and including multiple years along the journey.
    • Solution Architecture Design: Build and refine a digestible and usable consumer engagement solution architecture that can evolve as the breadth and complexity of your engagement programs grow.
    • Change Management: Evaluate organizational readiness to support new processes that enable emerging channels, engagement initiatives and products. Deliberate focus on organization change activities to ensure change is realized in impacted areas of the organization.
    • Custom Solution Delivery and Vendor Implementation: Evaluate investment decisions on consumer engagement and marketing technology solutions and provide end-to-end technology capability delivery whether vended or custom, spanning requirement definition through deployment.
    • Program and Project Management: Manage overall program and individual projects to measurable progress and outcomes and with consistent and rigorous methodologies that can be applied to all initiatives; including program approach definitions, custom and vended technology solution deployment, and organizational and process design.
    Effective consumer engagement is critical to success in today's healthcare environment as it is essential to a health plan's ability to deliver on the financial, population health and member satisfaction metrics their clients require.
    Together, we will design and build the right mix of capabilities to help you understand your members' needs, predict their behaviors, and proactively and effectively engage them across a variety of purchasing, health management and care seeking activities. Our proven approach will help you to build a sustainable, constantly improving consumer engagement capability.
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