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This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare
podcast, and we are live at the 2024
payer issues roundtable.
I'm joined by Dennis Hillen, who is the
senior vice president at Oscar Health. Dennis, thanks
for being here. Would love to have you
start off by briefly introducing yourself and telling
us a little bit more about your current
role. Yeah. Happy to. Thanks for having me.
So I'm Dennis Hillen. I'm senior vice president
for our insurance strategy and and product development
at Oscar Health.
I've been in the industry now for about
17 years with Oscar about four and a
half years. Before that, I was with Humana,
for about 12 years, focused on innovation and
transformation,
really after some frustrating experiences
being a health care consumer, for a small
actually, medium sized business at the time, and
then a consumer of the product that I
decided on behalf of the plan or on
behalf of the organization
And, wanted to get in and try to
figure out how to make it easier and
have been dedicated my career since, and happy
to be here today to talk about how
we are making that happen at Oscar Health.
Wonderful. Well, thank you for taking the time.
And let's start our conversation
with growth goals. So from improving member experience
and expanding value based care to controlling costs,
payer executives have ambitious growth goals for the
rest of 2024 and looking into the year
ahead.
So in your role, what is your top
priority and how are you planning to get
there?
So we're pioneering
a national health care marketplace
for the individual consumer. So we see this
as a growing market. If you look at
the size of the ACA today, it's now
over 22,000,000
lives. We see it growing to be an
even much bigger,
component of the way people get care and
ultimately the the health insurance market. This is
gonna happen not only through growth in the
ACA,
but also in the way,
employers buy their health plans for their employees
using something called ICRA,
which is a health care acronym for individual
coverage health reimbursement arrangement. So it's certainly a
mouthful, but the premise behind it is is
actually something aligned with what employers are looking
to do, and that's to drive choice and
reduce cost. So we see that as the
way forward. And what we wanna do is
then make sure that the health care marketplace
operates more like the free market.
It's
one of the largest
industries and and experiences in the country
that is sort of divorced from the way
people normally think about the decisions they make
and the cost that they incur as a
result. And so we're looking at the ACA
and the individual marketplace as an opportunity to
bring these things together.
And let's talk about population health for a
little bit. So how is your organization ensuring
equitable access to care across a diverse member
populations,
and what strategies have worked well for you
here? Or, on the other hand, what has
been the most challenging?
So it's been said often that health care
is very local, and we believe that not
only to be geographically local, but also local
in the context
of people and the communities that they identify
with. So whether it be who they surround
themselves, their family and friends, people that they
feel that are like them, or the experiences
that they,
encounter in life that define who they are,
we think that the healthcare experience should reflect
that as well. So when you look at
our low cost, tech first products, we have
the ability to then bring these preferences and
bring these experiences
into the way they engage with our product
and, ultimately, with the health care system. So
if it's linguistic,
cultural, regional, demographic preferences, these are things that
can be understood,
hopefully, all the way from the way people
choose plans and make that choice I was
mentioning earlier within the way they experience it
at every touch point along the way. One
of the things we've done is really been
focusing on the Spanish speaking population.
So we introduced something, a product called,
Buenasalud,
which is a Spanish first solution for, Hispanic
and Latino members that we are launching for
the first time in 2025 during open enrollment.
So the idea behind this is that all
the way from the way the plan shows
up in the marketplace
through the broker they interact with,
through the documents they receive,
through the providers we help them find,
their experience will be Spanish first and will
understand, you know, the culture that they'll that
they are coming from as much as possible
based off of the information,
not only that they choose to share, but
even the way that they choose to buy
the product.
So if you look at the results as
that that come from this focus, you'll find
a couple things. One, this is based on
what we call Ola Oscar.
If you go to our website, it's high
oscar.com. So it's a little bit of a
play on that. You can also go to
HOLA OSCAR dot com. It'll take you to
a Spanish version
of our main website. But what we intend
to do with that is to show that
there are ways we are being Spanish first.
And if you look at our NPS, which
is something we're very proud of, across the
board, it's around a 66.
So, you know, an NPS stands for net
promoter score. So it's basically the difference between
the people who promote your product versus the
people who would not promote your product or
the detractors.
And we see a significant impact
as a result of the Spanish focus where
NPS is 87.
So if you look at that and translate
that to then how we can engage people
in their health care journey,
the idea that we can meet them where
they are is gonna drive a few things.
1, it's gonna drive engagement, but it's gonna
drive retention, and it's also gonna help drive
a relationship between
our members and the providers that we hope
to build a relationship with them.
And let's talk about leadership for a second
here. So keeping pace in today's dynamic health
care landscape is challenging. So I'd love to
hear a piece of advice you'd share with
peer leaders wanting to grow their businesses while
keeping members top of mind.
Yeah.
My best advice would be to remember you
are a health care consumer.
And it's amazing as as a health care
executive,
how often
the context of
the choices that you are present presented with
or the lack of choices you're presented with
often get abstracted when you are thinking about
your health plan as an executive.
And so what I would encourage is that
when
picking the plan,
in whatever experience that you have, think about
that in the in the broad context that
where you sit in both seats. It's it's
amazing how many people, you know, they know
once people find out I'm a health plan
executive,
these can be very smart, seasoned
other health care executives.
They reach out for help. How can I
get a provider? Who's a good provider? How
much does this cost? What is the deductible?
Like, not necessarily, like, in the strict definition,
but what does that mean relative to my
situation?
And so my encouragement
would be to make sure that,
think about it. Think about yourself as a
consumer when you're making leadership decisions, when you're
thinking about your executive role,
and then also talk to other people within
your network, within your organization and broader,
your family, your friends, and then just your
extended professional network about their experience. Learn about
it. You're gonna learn. It's very frustrating. It's
very challenging. People want help. It is our
obligation as health care leaders to figure out
how to remove those barriers and how to
make it much simpler.
So bring all that data back into them,
the day to day life of being an
executive in decisions and choices that we're faced
with.
Absolutely. Well, Dennis, thanks for being here today
and joining me on the Beckert's Health Care
podcast. Again, we are live at the 2024
payer issues roundtable.