Engaging for Health: Turning Questions into Opportunities for Consumer Health Engagement

By: Phong Nguyen, EVP, Product Management & Strategy, Accolade

I’ve spent the past 20 years working inside and outside of technology. Across organizations and industries, I’ve worn a variety of hats and been on the front-lines of product development for some of the largest enterprise software and SaaS companies in the country. So when I was offered the chance to be a part of something transformative in healthcare — to develop solutions capable of effectively guiding people towards better health — I knew I had to take the leap. For me, the underlying mission was personal, and it made for an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.

When a child is ill, many parents’ first instinct is to trust no one and question everything — never stopping until they know their children are receiving the best care possible. So when my daughter became sick, and we heard from our health plan immediately after coming home from the hospital, my first instinct was to question them. Why are they reaching out? Is there an issue with our coverage? Are they trying to terminate our coverage? What’s the problem?

It didn’t occur to me that they might be reaching out to help, wanting to start a dialog about my daughter’s care. That said, my questions — and my engrained perceptions and biases toward healthcare — were not unique. Research shows that when it comes to managing healthcare, the consumer struggle is real — 38 percent of consumers don’t trust their health plan, 32 percent aren’t aware of their options and half of consumers go so far as to deem themselves health illiterate.

So what if we could flip that switch? What if we could change peoples’ perceptions and reactions by fundamentally changing how they interact with their healthcare? What if we could show compassion during vulnerable times and build trust? This mission is one that I fully believe in and it is the very reason why I’ve joined Accolade.

In my role as the head of product management and strategy at Accolade, one of my top priorities is to ensure our technology continually improves the human element of our approach — the “compassion” in our care delivery equation: our health assistants. If we empower them with technology that is truly intelligent, leveraging best in class capabilities across analytics, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), they become both a trusted ally and unmatched resource on the consumer’s journey toward better health and continued healthcare engagement.

But at the end of the day, what makes lasting consumer healthcare engagement possible? It all starts with having the right context. Healthcare is personal — just because two patients share the same condition and have the same benefits does not mean their outcomes will be the same. There are a myriad of life factors that come into play when determining the best care plan for each individual, and no machine is more useful at determining that context than a human.

And users are eager to provide that context once trust is built. Eighty-eight-percent of all user/Accolade relationships are initiated by the consumer directly, which means we’re already in the position of being trusted. That presents an incredible opportunity to embed intelligent technology into the healthcare delivery process at the outset, as early as possible, in order to make the biggest impact on our users’ health. It’s the combined high-touch and high-tech approach that makes it all work.

This level of engagement also means that we are capturing critical data from the outset. All of the resulting touchpoints in a user’s experience then become additional data elements in building the holistic, longitudinal view of a person. With this type of visibility and context, we’re not just able to answer a user’s healthcare related question, but we’re actively converting those questions into opportunities for more, better engagement — intervening earlier, many times before a problem arises. Science + technology + compassion equals lasting engagement, better outcomes and lower costs.

As I look ahead to the future of the Accolade platform and the pillars upon which we’ll continue to build, there are four key areas which must remain our focus: cultivating deep, engaging relationships with users; offering an unmatched user experience; delivering intelligence through technology; enabling continued growth and scale. With each of these components as the foundational building blocks, I look forward to taking the next steps forward with Accolade and reinventing the consumer healthcare experience — once user’s health at a time.