Most of the chatter about mHealth’s promise to change care delivery, outcomes and population health focuses on patients and providers. But with a third of Google searches related to health insurance coming from mobile devices, payers need more than just a mere presence.
As more plans adopt mobile strategies, health insurance as a whole has a lot of work to do to keep pace with the modern mobile, Internet-based consumer, according to Bill Lan, Google’s head of industry, insurance and services.
Health reform has become synonymous with insurance reform from the customer’s point of view, a reality illustrated by some queries Google sees today that “didn’t even exist two years ago,” he said.
Indeed, about 30 percent of all Google queries related to health insurance originate from mobile devices, Lan said. “If you don’t have an engagement strategy around mobile,” he said, “you’re basically missing out on a third of that traffic.”
[See also: Is it time to nail down a clearer mHealth definition?]
More than being available through mobile apps, Lan said insurers should also take note of consumer fragmentation and friction. Plans vying for members in insurance exchanges, Medicaid or Medicare are joining the ranks of other industries – notably retail – in trying to use mobile health content and personalized outreach without alienating customers, Lan said.
To target certain demographics through mobile and other channels, insurers should also think about how their messages can get across to the right people in a sea of information and media.
“If you advertise on CNN and a user watches yoga videos and then types in 'type 2 diabetes,' (or a user) is drinking Red Bull and searching for ‘ACA penalties,' those are two different types of conversations you want to have,” Lan said.
The notion of friction, and the ability to remove it for consumers through smoother processes, has been one of Google’s long-running obsessions.
From an operational standpoint, gathering data on that friction and on engagement “touch points” and using them effectively is going to be a challenge for insurers and health organizations – as it is for other industries. But mobile and web consumer data is available, Lan said, and that's a good place to get started.
“It’s something that we have to think about from a technology standpoint. If you start to build a solution that really solves (that problem) now, it’s already too late,” he said during a recent America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) forum in Chicago.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation entrepreneur-in-residence Thomas Goetz echoed a similar argument during that forum, telling insurance and health professionals to not only measure the outcomes of their mobile efforts but to measure the experiences.
“Software has eaten the world,” he said. “It has gone through industry after industry and turned analog dollars into digital pennies by reducing costs,” and now it’s going to consumers through their devices, enabling everything from personal health tracking to mobile claims management.
In healthcare, Lan said, the convergence of mobile devices and consumer friction is leading organizations to focus more on the consumer experience.
“The health law has just accelerated that,” Lan said.
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