More on consumer targeting for health plans

By Matthew Holt

Wrapping up this morning's Silverlink seminar….

Stan Nowak, Silverlink CEO, says we’re all part of an experiment in response rate from credit card marketing departments (previous speaker Fred Jubitz had talked lots about that!). It’s not cheap to do, but the best companies in consumer marketing are doing it because those experiments (sending out all those letters) can offer a small percentage lift. And they’re good at predicting who will do what based on these segments.

But in health care those same metrics don’t apply. What determines health behaviors are not the same thing as what determines other decisions. That makes it much more complex. Adaptive HealthComm Science is Silverlink’s tag line for using analytics to change the message, the time, the voice used, (Tony Soprano for a collections call?) etc, etc, to see what results work better. Years ago they actually found that using a southern accent for calls in the south did 40 percent better than using a regular “voice.” So they’re using the analytics and then as Stan says are in the business of doing something about it (trying to reach people and change their behaviors).

And then continual measurement, testing and re-testing is the key. Stan says that health care (including SIlverlink) is very early in figuring out what drives behaviors (even though they have pretty good data).

However there's no question it’s really, really hard, and it’s not clear that health plans can make the jump to focus on this. Liz Boehm quoted Yoda — “Don’t try, do or not do.”

Outside in the corridor Liz also mentioned to me that the problem of getting people to change their health behaviors has never been done by anyone (I mentioned Nazi Germany’s Strength through Joy recreation & exercise program, but Liz pointed out that that type of “encouragement” might not go down too well in the American health care market!). So as health plans get into this, while changing health behaviors is something that should be done, it’s still not certain that it can be done in a way that will really change population health.

And that indeed is the biggest challenge of all.