In Highmark We Trust

The survey results are in…people don’t interact with health insurance, even in a health pandemic

After a few weeks out on the internet via Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reddit, we received responses from 177 people around the world and concluded our survey.

Our goal was to see if an emergency situation (COVID-19) could motivate people to interact with their insurance to learn more and thus be prepared.

We found that in regards to COVID-19, less than 5% of respondents consulted insurance for information or have contacted them to prevent and prepare.

Half of our participants did not know which hospital to go to that’s covered by their insurance in the case they showed life-threatening symptoms. More than half did not know the cost of a hospital visit.

In this post-truth era, people want to be informed. It’s not surprising that they obtain information from news and media as they are encapsulated by it. However, when it comes down to the specifics of how to proceed if something happens, there is still a gap of knowledge transfer.

More than 20% of our respondents did not know what to do in case they showed symptoms.

This is where our opportunity lies. In a time when reliable information can be in short supply, Highmark can be a source for reliable, accurate information about healthcare costs to the public, establishing trust in the process.

The good news is that our data shows that people want insurance to play a more active role, at least in the case of preventing the spread of COVID-19.

Reframing the concept model to focus our research

As a team, we had explored the multitude of players and relationships in the healthcare system, from the patient to the medical admin to the doctor. We discovered new and surprising players along the way such as case managers and brokers. We decided to take the current state and reframe it into a preferred state.

Given current events and what we saw in the survey results, our team decided to focus on the relationship between Highmark and its members moving forward. We saw a clear opportunity space where we could add value by building trust.

The question is then, how do we start to build this trust.

Interviewing brokers to understand why employers love them so much

In our concept model, we discovered that brokers gain a lot of trust from their clients, who are mainly employers, so we decided to talk to a broker.

Our goal was to understand their role in the healthcare environment and why employers seem to have such a positive opinion of them. Our main takeaways were:

Maintaining relationships is paramount

Brokers advocate for their clients, but even when they feel that insurance companies are being unfair they won’t call them out directly.

Brokers aren’t doing anything “special”

But what they do, they do well. They have multiple teams that specialize in different domains

In reality, the clients still have to do a lot of work

Brokers rely on their clients still to educate their employees, insurance companies to bring in health coaches, both to utilize patient data.

So why do clients rave about brokers?

Trust. We had heard about the broker from one of their clients, and employer who raved about how helpful their broker is. It turns out brokers can put the various pieces together and bridge gaps. They take what the client wants and give them the best options and ultimately their performance earns them the trust of their clients.

Interviewing a 19-year-old to get young people’s view on health

We learned from previous research that people don’t want insurance to view them as a “sick person” but rather as a person, so we decided to look into holistic health and interview a 19-year-old, someone who has not gone through insurance themselves.

We conducted a semi-structured interview with a 19-year old. Our goal was to understand young people’s views on health and subsequently healthcare. Our main takeaways were:

Staying healthy is motivated by longevity

The 19-year-old focuses mainly on physical and mental health because they “want to live a long and healthy life.”

COVID-19 has changed view of health significantly

COVID-19 has influenced my view on health significantly because it shows that you have to be mindful of food-related or contagious disease.”

So what does the younger generation think about insurance?

They’re a blank slate. They have a mutual view since either their parents take care of it or they haven’t had to deal with too many bills. They can be one way we can start to build trust and improve on the relationship as trust has not been eroded.

Why why why why why — why do you trust someone or something

We wanted to understand what are the building blocks of trust so we used 5 Why’s to dig deeper into the parts of trust.

We then affinity’d our why’s into how might we’s.

How might we…

• be more relevant to our members’ lifestyle/lives?
• give members transparency into our processes and motives?
• help members feel more in control and empowered?
• make our members interactions with us more convenient?
• get people more familiar with us?
• help our members be healthy?
• show our members that others trust us?
• show our members that we know what we are doing?

We took the needs for relevance, transparency, control, convenience and each generated potential solutions for further research. We’re going to transform these ideas into storyboards and test them with users.

We hope you are staying healthy and safe — The A Team