Looking out the train window at a NJ Transit Coastline stop, I saw the future of shopping in health care. On the platform were side-by-side advertisements for health plans.
Typically the domain of Broadway shows, mobile carriers and whiskey makers, seeing not one, but two insurance companies vie for mind space among New York commuters was heartening (even astounding) to a digital health executive like me.
Let me explain. For years, the industry has talked about the promise shopping holds to reduce costs and improve quality. But the speed of most things in health care comes at a snail’s pace.
It makes sense that consumers’ first glimpse of an emerging health care economy is through insurance plan shopping. At 18-months old, health exchanges are nearing the end of their infancy. Individual health plans make up 40 percent of the insurance market – a major increase from the 10 percent they represented before the Affordable Care Act.
The problem with shopping for health insurance is that one plan doesn’t look much different from the next. On the exchange, the concocted metal distinctions – bronze, silver, gold, and platinum – delineate cost, but not unique selling propositions. That said the insurance exchanges have served in an important starter role towards coupling healthcare and shopping in the minds of consumers.
And so, as it has always been, advertising is the quickest means to creating company and product differentiation and accelerating that shopping curve.
Other products, more alike than different –think dish soap, car insurance and beer – have established their own brand promises and attributes through marketing dollars. Palmolive softens hands as you do dishes. Fifteen minutes could save you 15 percent with Geico. Coors is coldest beer in the world. So, too, will taglines and characters come to differentiate health plans, complete with geckos and Clydesdales, even a Super Bowl ad.
But as insurers get hip to courting customers and customers hip to being courted, additional developments will usher in shopping around doctor selection and medical procedures: The rise of high deductible plans has made consumers more sensitive to medical care costs; The emergence of alternative care settings like specialty centers, retail health clinics and telemedicine offer choice and convenience; Moreover, the ability to shop virtually every other aspect of our daily lives.
Not too long ago, critics dismissed the idea that a hip replacement could be purchased like a car. Today, that assertion might be met with ‘How soon?’’ Young companies are working hard on solutions that lend transparency to the process of making informed healthcare choices. Smart, progressive health providers have also embraced transparency, not just for the good of customers, but their bottom-line, as well.
It won’t be tomorrow, but the path has decidedly accelerated. We are now fumbling towards the direction of health insurers and providers becoming true consumer brands, as savvy as Apple or Nike.
How will the wave of mergers currently engulfing the health insurance industry impact this development? It won’t, meaningfully. Whether five or three mega-insurers, insurance is local and competition will remain. At the same time, we are all of a sudden on a fast(er)-track relative to courting and charming, and expect by the time these unions reach operationally actionable space, we will have all grown accustomed to being wooed. And what’s not to like about that.
After all, $3 trillion dollar industry demands a number of strategies for growing membership. Given that, it wouldn’t be surprising to see health ads take up not just two spaces, but the whole platform.
Mitch Rothschild is Executive Chairman and Founder of Vitals.com
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