Hello, everyone, and thank you for tuning in
to the Becker's health care podcast. We are
on-site at Becker's fall payer issues roundtable and
are thrilled to be joined today by Russ
VanGorp,
associate managing director with Publicis Sapient. Russ, thank
you so much for joining us today.
Thanks, Brian. Great to be here. Great to
have you. Can can you just to set
the stage here, can you introduce yourself, share
a few pertinent details about your your professional
background and your work in health care? Yeah.
Absolutely. I work at Publicis Sapient. I'm in
our payer health strategy practice. And and what
that means is we partner with our health
care clients to make care more accessible,
affordable, and consumer friendly in a digital world.
And so a lot of the the transformation
agenda around around digital innovation
is where I where I play.
Excellent. Well, great to have you here. Let's
let's dig in. And, you know, we hear
many leaders in the Paris space are really
talking about and expecting health care to become
more consumer centric,
be it through virtual care or more customized
care options.
And the hope is these trends will help
historically underserved communities as well sort of get
get access to care and increase health care
literacy as well, health care have an educational
impact there.
So can you talk a little bit about
how you approach consumer engagement
and and what trends you're seeing that that's
making an impact for those folks today?
Yeah. It's it's a good question. I mean,
engaging members is tricky. Their their health is
kinda constantly changing.
Their coverage is also changing. They're switching plans.
And this makes it even harder in underserved
communities when, you know, basic needs kinda take
priority. And so, you know, our research has
shown that what matters most to people is
is really their quality of life, and that's
a personal choice and and being able to
spend time with family, friends, and and really
be healthy to do those types of things.
And so engagement really has to focus on
what the consumer cares about. And this starts
even before someone really becomes a member, by
guiding them through their plan options.
Not just based on, you know, cost or
network, but on things like, you know, their
chronic conditions,
aging with peace of mind, those things that
allow them to kind of do the things
that they wanna do. Right. Right. And it's
different for everyone. Right? That's right. And, and
I think there's a lot of new tools
and and opportunities to to engage differently.
I think plans, you know, historically have been
a very business out approach to how they
engage with their members. And I think there's
really yeah. With generative AI and AI, I
think there's really an opportunity to actually have
a consumer
in approach Okay. And actually hear, you know,
from them around what their needs are and
being able to to talk back to them
in in the context of the plan and
how they meet those needs. Yeah. It's some
some excitement there around AI sort of to
enhance communications and engagement in that way.
I I did I did see a recent
survey that did find though that many health
care organizations might be overlooking
key factors for successful implementation
for for that technology, though. How how are
payers specifically responding and and driving impact through
technology here, and and and what are the
those those things, those factors that folks shouldn't
overlook?
Yeah. I would say payers are making progress,
but there's still a lot of work to
be done. And a lot of this is
driven, you know, the internal silos that make
it really hard.
And, you do utilizing data in a meaningful
way to consumers is is still a big
challenge. And so I would say it's all
about prioritizing. You gotta start small. You gotta
clean the right data. You gotta set up
the tools with the proper governance and the
human oversight.
And over time, the goal is to move
more to a direct to consumer
activation.
But we need to build the trust, and
we need to validate the AI models first.
And the power of Gen AI really lies
in the collection of that first party data.
Mhmm. And that's really gonna be a competitive
advantage going forward is really understanding your consumers
and be able to segment them
really with how they talk and how they
you know, the needs that they actually provide
you,
directly, you know, through a digital channel. Yeah.
The data is really everything. Isn't it? Like,
it it's it's not gonna be the the
technology is not gonna be as effective if
you don't got the right data. Right? Truly
is. And I think the notion of, you
know, if you're able to we're actually working
with some of our clients right now around
AI driven search and conversational
AI type chat tools.
Still still yet a lot of work to
be done on those. But the idea of
being able to have a a member or
a prospect to be able to talk about
their health and their in their own language
and their own words and be able to
capture that first party data and be able
to structure that in a way that you
can actually use it throughout the plan year.
And and you can remind them if they
talked about an elective procedure during the shopping
experience. Mhmm. You can bring that up during
the plan year and personalized engagement in a
way that actually meets them with their needs.
That's that's mind blowing difference in the payer
landscape. Yeah. And and when you when you
think about that specific, that personalized consumer engagement,
are other industries doing this better,
that that in health care? And I think
I I kinda know the answer to that.
But but wanna get your take in terms
of what
lessons can be learned from other industries who
would really
sort of nailed this in a way that
that health care hasn't yet. Yeah. Absolutely.
That proves the statement. We actually work with
a lot of the the largest consumer and
retail brands out there. One example is, you
know, we we partner with Delta in driving
a lot of their personalization,
on all of their channels. And, not necessarily
something we worked on, but what I really
you know, one example at Delta is, you
know, their year end review type statement that
actually provides you some context around what you
did use that year and the value of
that. I think a lot of these principles
can be applied in the health care setting,
you know,
to actually understand, you know, be proactive, be
helpful, provide context as
to, you know, those those things that they
could utilize to improve their health. You know,
I think a lot of that
in consumer and retail is a bit easier
because the data is a little bit cleaner.
Back to the data again. But I think,
you know, as you start small and identify
what those use cases are, you can you
can clean that data and and actually provide
some of those experiences that relate to kinda
game change the the, overall member engagement experience.
Yeah. And and to be fair to health
care, right, health care's hard. Healthier's health care's
complicated. So,
coming to it with a clean set of
data is a little bit more challenging than
in other industries. Right? Right. That's right. So,
at at SAP, you focus on data interoperability
and enhancing the experience for for consumers and
clinicians alike.
How is your approach making a difference?
And what should what can other leaders, I
guess, listening to this learn from your approach?
Yeah. I I where we, start with our
clients is,
largely with the business. And we we help
them understand what is the consumer and the
business value that they wanna drive
and started working backward from that. And so
we use integrated kinda capability teams across strategy,
product, experience, engineering
in a pod formation
to be able to take that use case
or that value
pool, unpack it, and actually look at, you
know, the data and the technology that are
essential to that to that engagement strategy.
And it's it's not looking at trying to,
you know, grab all the data and make
it all interoperable.
It's really focusing on what is that consumer
and business value they wanna drive, and what
is the relevant data that's attached to that.
Yeah. Really having a at the onset, know
where you wanna be, know where the finish
line is. Exactly. Yeah.
Anything else you'd like to share with with
listeners that we didn't touch on or anything
you wanna reemphasize as well? I think this
the only thing is, you know, member engagement
is an ongoing journey. It's never really done.
I think the key is to really start
somewhere and celebrate, you know, the wins along
the way, track performance,
baseline, and measure improvement.
Yep. Excellent. Well, Russ, it's been a pleasure
speaking with you today. Thank you.
Well, I thank Russ again for taking the
time to come on the podcast, and I
wanna thank Publicis Sapient for sponsoring today's content.
To our listeners, thank you for joining us,
and please be sure to check out other
Becker's podcasts. Have a wonderful rest of your
day.