UsableMarkets

For anyone who has worked with a health insurance company, this report should come as no surprise. Health Populi summarizes:

A new survey published by the National Business Coalition on Health (NBCH) finds that only 31% of health plans collect and publish patient experience data. And, like the readers of the National Inquirer, health care consumers have inquiring minds that want to know. We also want to know about quality — and mortality and complication rates are provided by only 28% of plans.

Most plans have picked the low-hanging fruit of provider directories, with virtually all plans providing those. But frankly, that’s just Yellow Pages with physician listings. Over half of plans include information on office hours. Just under two-thirds furnish data from public sources on quality (e.g., HEDIS).

In Connecting the Dots in Health Care, released at the NBCH’s 12th annual conference, the eValue8 study also found that plans are sitting on mountains of valuable health data they aren’t leveraging to improve patient care. For example, claims data easily identify enrollees who have received a mammograms; the plan could remind these women to schedule the test, and continue to alert her until she does.

The real problem is that health care insurance companies have IT systems that are, shall we say, a bit old. Getting all these various systems to do what you want, and deliver the data that you need, requires smart, aggresive people, time and money. When I recently worked with a healthcare insurance company these things seemed to be in short supply.

As always, thanks for listening.
~alex