Person-centered Marketing for the Triple Win [WATCH]

[TRANSCRIPT]

Hi, you’re watching Person-centered Marketing for the Triple Win. I’m glad you’re here.

I’m Ashley Conger and along with my partner Kristen Wilson, and we are Merit Create.

We’re a consumer experience agency that helps health plans and healthcare organizations work more closely with their consumers to improve outcomes at both the individual and at the plan or organizational level.

We were founded purely on the focus of meeting consumers where they are, together. We have over 35 years of consumer marketing experience to draw from, so don’t let those headshots fool you.

Our goal is to make healthcare more accessible, more equitable, and generally easier for consumers to understand and navigate so that health plans and healthcare organizations have longer, more mutually beneficial relationships with their members and consumers.

My goals today are to:

Help you understand person-centered marketing a bit better and how it improves consumer experience.

Discuss the key drivers that make consumer experience critically important right now.

Outline the five building blocks of a person-centered marketing approach.

Define the outcomes that this approach can deliver and help you think about where you might want to get started.

So what is person-centered marketing? Well, let’s start with the big picture.

Person-centered thinking and person-centered care are fundamental tenets of self-directed care. Rooted in the belief that each person’s unique goals, values, and needs must guide clinical decisions. Person-centered care empowers an individual to define what their best life looks like and then to determine what supports and resources they need to achieve that best life.

In turn, marketing is any activity or interaction that informs, persuades or educates.

When we put those two together, person-centered marketing is outreached that is highly individualized to unique behaviors and actions, ultimately allowing the consumer to drive. What happens next?

When you begin to utilize person-centered marketing, you reframe every touchpoint so that the needs and the experience of the consumer are always at the center.

So let’s use an analogy to explore that a little more closely. While Kristen and I work all over the country, we are based in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is the home of NASCAR racing.

And at the macro level, person-centered marketing looks a lot like a racetrack with one big difference.

You start at the finish line or begin with the end in mind, and that means that you have a clear definition of what you want to achieve.

For example, better adherence to care plans or keeping and showing up for doctor visits or wellness exams, disease management, or a better understanding of how something works.

Once you have your end in mind, all planning starts with the end user, the consumer. And the first thing we want to understand is does the consumer want to achieve the same thing?

And if so, how would they like to achieve it? What tools are they likely to use? What are they like? What are they not like? Once you have this information only then do you go back and begin program design, content creation or community outreach planning. And then just like on the racetrack, you make a pit stop, you check back in with the consumer. Does this make sense? Is it easy to use, easy to understand? And what barriers might pop up along the way that could slow or stop the consumer? Do we as an organization have the ability to mitigate those barriers?

Once you do this, you really are off to the race and just like a real race, continued pit stops are important to evaluate performance, make adjustments and improvements and head back out around the track.

This person-centered approach is a fundamental way to improve consumer experience.

So why should consumer experience be a priority?

Well, we think there are five key reasons that it’s critically important right now.

And the first is the current landscape. You’re here and you’re in healthcare, and so you know that healthcare is changing fast, it’s changing almost daily, and it’s important that we understand the landscape we’re working in. We have record growth and adoption and technology. We have massive consolidation at the payer practice and system levels along with acquisitions of add-ons like technology platforms.

And we have in a lot of cases a breakdown in the traditional one-on-one relationships between consumers and their healthcare providers. Certainly, the COVID pandemic has hastened this, but consumers all around the country, particularly younger consumers, are choosing to chart a new course in healthcare.

All of these things create an opportunity for us to redefine how we interact with healthcare consumers and to create new pathways for consumers to seek not just care, but information, tools and resources to manage their health. The plans and organizations who know and act on this opportunity will be poised for long-term growth and success and most importantly, to achieve better outcomes for members.

The second reason to prioritize consumer experience now is regulations. There are numerous regulatory, statutory and contractual and other requirements that can take significant finances and resources to achieve some that you might be familiar with or have worked on include federal and state requirements that ensure the needs and abilities of consumers are met.

For example, 42 CFR parts for Medicaid and Medicare, which have stringent requirements around marketing and member engagement or education at the state level, we have new programs cropping up every day around health equity or social determinants, and they also have rigorous requirements around engagement and outcomes.

We also have technology standards and requirements around accessibility and security. For example, the interoperability and patient access final rule required the creation of health portals and information sharing that we’re still trying to optimize year after it went live.

HITRUST certification and SOC 2 attestation and other cybersecurity standards and something that we’re really focused on here at Merit, Web Content accessibility guidelines and 508 compliance for digital content and digital assets.

And lastly, accreditation to demonstrate quality healthcare. That could be NCQA, URAC, or another program that’s localized either at your state or plan and organization level.

The third reason to prioritize consumer experience now is ratings. We have star ratings, we have JD Power and customer satisfaction scores. We have net promoter scores, we have community needs assessments, and we have many other customer satisfaction and engagement surveys that are likely required for both your funding and contracts.

The fourth reason to prioritize consumer experience now is member churn. It is an expensive risk for health plans and organizations because the cost to acquire a new member or patient is greater than keeping the existing member or patient engaged and satisfied.

It’s also a great risk to consumers. Disruptions and care can cause lapses in treatment or management resulting in new diagnoses, exacerbations and existing conditions, and at the worst acute episodes that require significant medical intervention. And the fifth reason to prioritize consumer experience right now is healthier consumers, because ultimately consumers who are engaged, informed will be better equipped to take care of themselves.

All of these drivers have significant impacts on the health and sustainability of your organization. And if consumer experience is not at the center of all the work you’re doing, you may risk having to rebuild or encounter compliance issues or even loss of members and patients.

So what does a person-centered marketing approach look like?

There are five key building blocks of person-centered marketing, and the first is your channel strategy. We refer to outreach mechanisms as channels. This can be your website, a brochure about a service or a facility, text messages between the plan or individuals at the plan and consumers written correspondence, which includes benefits and claims information, your health portal or social media. Anything that touches a consumer is a channel and it’s absolutely critical to have both an overarching mission and guiding principles for your outreach as well as a dedicated strategy for each channel.

The second building block of a person-centered marketing approach is your external ecosystem. Starting with consumers and looking outside in what does interaction with your organization look like or feel like? Do you have member journey maps? If not, those are a great place to start and if so, congrats, you are on the right track.

I can tell you from experience that having a journey map is step 0.5. It’s what you do with them and gaining consensus and buy-in across your organization on how to start, where to start, what to measure. That’s much harder to determine what are the different touch points a consumer has with your organization? Where is it hard for them and where is it easy? And how many levels and layers of your organization does a consumer have to interact with to address any single issue? And how often this understanding is truly foundational to getting a handle on consumer experience and developing a person-centered marketing framework.

The third building block of a person-centered marketing approach is your internal ecosystem. So now we’re looking inside out and does everyone in your organization really and truly understand that they are contributing to consumer experience? How many different internal functions are involved in a single process?

I know this answer surprised me and it may surprise you. For example, a service approval or denial can include doctors, clinicians, utilization managers, lawyers, regulators, and case workers just to name a few. So it’s important to understand where there are disconnects and even more important to understand where are the opportunities to better connect the experience across all facets of your organization.

The fourth building block of a person-centered marketing approach is program optimization. Now you may have a few programs, or you may have lots of programs. It really depends on the scope of your organization as well as your individual strategic priorities.

Some examples might include mental health awareness or health screening tools, diabetes management, smoking cessation, or even re-enrollment in Medicaid if the PHE unwinding ever really happens.

And are your programs performing and meeting goals? And importantly, thinking back to what we mentioned earlier, are the goals of your program and the goals of your consumers the same? And if not, how can we create harmony between those things?

And the final building block of person-centered marketing are checkpoints or like we said earlier, pit stops. And that’s evaluating and iterating on everything that happens in the first four building blocks.

In person-centered planning, there’s a common tool called a four plus one that’s utilized to access how things are going. And when you reflect on a particular outreach strategy or process, ask yourself these questions. What have we tried? What have we learned? What are we pleased about and what are we concerned about? And then the plus one, what should we do next based on what we have learned?

And while this may seem the most simple and straightforward of the checkpoints, I will tell you it’s by far the hardest to do. It requires intention, it requires rigor, it requires slowing and sometimes even stopping what you’re doing to reassess and reconfigure. If you can do this and make time for this, it will make everything that happens in the first four building blocks that much more successful.

So this all sounds great, right? I mean, theoretically, it makes great sense. Is it logical or practical to implement? And if we do, what are the risks? And if we don’t, what are the rewards? Let’s think back to the drivers we discussed.

We really are at a pivotal moment in healthcare and investing in prioritizing. Consumer experience delivers first and foremost sustainability.

We can survive and thrive or lose contracts, lose members, lose market share.

The second outcome is compliance. And we do not have a choice here. We have to meet the requirements set forth for us by state and federal government.

The third outcome is satisfaction. This is table stakes for growth. It’s table stakes for engaged consumers that want to interact and derive benefit from your organization or health plan.

The fourth outcome is plan of choice. Loyalty truly is everything. And there is nothing more valuable than trust between a consumer and your organization and for the consumer to think and say, This organization wants what’s best for me and I want them to help me manage my care and my health.

And the fifth outcome is healthy humans. It really is the holy grail and why all of us are here in healthcare. So we talked about a triple win.

The outcomes of a person-centered marketing approach are really more like a quintuple win. It just doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

So now that we’ve given you a framework for person-centered marketing and talked about why consumer experience is so critically important, let’s talk just for a moment about what might be holding you back.

And the truth of the matter is it’s hard. It’s just hard.

We’ve talked about compliance as a driver, it’s also a burden. Meeting required obligations every day is more than a full-time job. And when your day job and your day responsibilities are already maxed, innovating or shifting focus is incredibly hard to do. And you likely already have limited resources and limited staff.

We also have competing priorities. We all have those. Maybe you’re considering adding a service line or bidding on a new contract or going for a new accreditation or re-accreditation.

There is always too much work, too little time, and too few humans. And then when we do outreach, it’s easy to fall in the trap of checking boxes and then it can become scripted or even disconnected from the humanity of what you’re trying to achieve.

And lastly, we cannot talk about this being hard without talking about culture. Fundamentally, if your organization does not have a culture, a person-centeredness, you will have an uphill battle. It is achievable, but top to bottom, bottom to top, side to side, making consumer experience your North Star and utilizing a person-centered marketing approach in all that you do is a culture shift.

So where does it make sense to get started? Well, just like your weekend warrior projects, you can DIY it, you can do it yourself. The pros of this approach is you can use existing resources. The cons of this approach is it uses existing resources.

So you can also bring in consultants or utilize a consultant that you may already be engaged with. And consultants are great. We’ve used them and we are a consultant of sorts. And the pros is they have a deep bench of resources and information. They can be a little slow depending on the size of the consultancy.

And if you’re in the nonprofit space, which many health plans and healthcare organizations are, it can cost a lot of money to engage with consultants. You’re also on their timeline and processes. And when you do uncover something that you really want to focus on a lot of time, that’s a new scope of work. And sometimes you have to deal with turnover as well.

So a third option is to think about extending your team with a smaller, very niche agency that understands the industry, understands your space, and understands the policy, and can simply parachute in and put more arms and legs around the table. Focus on your consumers and what your organization wants to achieve.

Thanks for spending time with us today. I hope this was helpful and meaningful, and more importantly, that you’re inspired to make consumer experience your North Star and develop a person-centered marketing approach.

We’d love to chat with you, answer any questions, and we hope you’ll reach out. You can reach us on our website: meritcreate.com. You can email us at info@meritcreate.com and you can find us on LinkedIn.

Thanks so much and be well.