Our 12 Months to Christmas

This holiday season, we have been looking back at how the years’ events have shaped Energesse and how we help our clients. There’s gratitude in everything we do, and we would like to recap our 12 months to Christmas!

January: We presented our inaugural Energesse Patient Experience (PX) Awards to two well-deserving clients – Western Sydney LHD (WSLHD) in Australia and Bagan Specialist Centre in Malaysia. They achieved significant wins in progressing their organisation’s measurement and improvement capabilities, see here.

February: We helped deploy the MES real-time patient feedback and survey platform at South Western Sydney LHD (SWSLHD) who gained strong traction across their hospitals including Liverpool, Bankstown Lidcombe, Bowral & District, Camden, Campbelltown, and the Oral Health Clinic. Find out more about their story here.

March: We celebrated when the Energesse-WSLHD partnership was as a Finalist for the Best Digital Transformation Project Award at the 2018 Australian Healthcare Week Excellence Awards! We continue to work with WSLHD in their patient experience efforts. We also helped Eastern Melbourne PHN (EMPHN), via their CEO Robin Whyte, her Board and executive with the further development of their Strategy and Performance framework. Our process to do this has now gained interest from other PHNs. 

April: I was honoured to be invited to be the Keynote Speaker at the Australian Telehealth Conference organised by the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) – the recording of the keynote can be viewed here. I also delivered a patient experience workshop at the PXSymposia organised by NSW Health.

May: I had the opportunity to speak about how the research sector could improve Consumer Engagement at the Research Australia Speaker Series. It was great to be part of the panel with Jean-Frederic Levesque from the Agency of Clinical Innovation. Attendees came from across the Australian research landscape and were supported by the Garvan Institute and Vodafone Foundation. Great job to CEO Nadia Levin and her team for organising it.  Click here for more info.

June: I had the pleasure of interviewing Martin Bowles, CEO of Calvary Health as part of the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) Health Leaders Roundtable podcast. A few weeks later I was invited to deliver the education keynote on Strategy and Performance Optimisation to health financial leaders i.e. CFO’s and financial managers, to help them play a bigger role in strategic decisions.

We also completed the process of becoming a member of the Apple Consultant Network (ACN). We are looking forward to evolving the relationship with Apple Health and helping use Apple products to improve experiences in hospitals and other healthcare organisations in 2019.

July: We held our inaugural Patient Experience Roundtable in partnership with The Beryl Institute and WSLHD. The Roundtable helped leaders and patient experience champions understand how to make a greater impact in the patient experience movement, share learnings and network. It was great to have the President of the Beryl Institute, Jason Wolf as speaker – this was the first PX Roundtable outside of Australia! CEO of WSLHD, Danny O’Connor also delivered the opening speech on how to engage leaders in patient-centered care. Find out more here. 

We love teaching and education, so July marked the start of our hugely popular free online Energesse Master class series. We covered a range of topics on patient-centered care to help managers and clinicians on patient experience improvement and culture change and increase skills and capability.

August: We were very excited to share our Energesse Patient Experience Maturity Model – a solution aimed at identifying the patient experience maturity level of a healthcare organisation. The solution conducts a gap analysis and capability assessment on person-centered care and identifies ‘what-to-do’ to improve patient experience and progress on the maturity spectrum. It also has matrices for ‘how to do it’ i.e. actions, solutions to improve PX-centered capabilities. We are thrilled about our first use-case to a major hospital in Victoria. If you feel the PX Mate might speak directly to your pain points, just call or email us to find out more.

September: I was grateful for the opportunity to help patients with hearing difficulties as we ran an online training event on ‘Client-Centered Care’ with Australian Hearing. It was a great opportunity to share our learnings with a new segment of health professionals, clinicians and managers. 

October: We continued to expand our presence in championing patient experience movement through partnerships in IHF Brisbane and the IHI-BMJ Conference in Melbourne. We are proud to continue supporting these leading events.

November: We were at the Healthshare Expo. We also collaborated with Avent Edge for the PX Summit in Melbourne. It was also the month we delivered patient experience training to some of the top cardiologists in Malaysia, at the National Heart Institute (IJN) in Malaysia. IJN is the hospital that saved my father’s life when he went through a quadruple bypass and I count this opportunity as one of my top 5 career highlights of all time, as the cardiologist that treated my dad was actually in the training session I delivered there!

December: We were very thankful to have Nick Ryan, CEO of the Australian Aged Care Quality Agency work with us, to share learnings with the aged care sector, as we have been asked to support consumer engagement and experience improvement for aged care organisations in 2019.

Against the backdrop of these highlights, we welcomed more partridges in our pear tree! Two new employees joined us with great impact, Sharon Dayus (former ICU Nurse and eMR implementation analyst from Cambridge Hospitals Trust UK) as our Patient Experience Specialist and Charles Janoras, (Data Science from Phillipines) in our Operations team.

Energesse has had an amazing year -and it is mostly thanks to you, who are out there putting in the hard work to improve the health and wellbeing of peoples’ lives. My team and I are very grateful for your continued effort and support, and we hope for an even greater 2019, making more waves in evolving the patient experience movement!

A Patient Story to Inspire You Today…

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you’ve come back refreshed from the holidays and ready to start the year off with a bang! Here’s an inspirational story to help you – with your New Year resolutions, your own personal health or your understanding of the patients and consumers you encounter everyday.

I met Alana Henderson, a patient advocate, at a HISA talk late last year. A woman who had a stroke at the age of 59 (not to mention diabetes and cancer) who changed her life by project managing her health like an engineer. Find out more about how she transitioned out of her dire health circumstances (for less than AUD$300!) through her book ‘Out of the Fog’ (available on Amazon) OR watch the interview below now…

Alana’s key message to practitioners and providers is to ‘not be afraid of what patients do for themselves’. Support the involvement they have in their own care and you can be assured of delivering a meaningful patient experience.

Talk to us now if you are thinking of spearheading initiatives this year around just that! We’ve all the advice, support, training or technology you might need.

 

Election Policies Need to Put Patients First

The Australian Federal Elections are drawing near. The Conservatives and the Labour Party are once again pitching their wares – fighting it out on who has the best health policy. Amongst the spouted sales spiel and all its nation-centric statistical data, the patient’s (what the policies are/should be ultimately all about) voice is lost.

A recently released book on ‘Patient-Provider Communication’ (Blackstone, Beukelman and Yorkston, April 2015), noted ‘that patients, health care providers, policy makers, and researchers live in nearly parallel universes with differing incentives, access to data and information, accountability expectations, and time frames for action’. What this alludes to is the potential for differing visions in patient healthcare, experiences and communications – resulting in a potentially disparate state of affairs.

What if patient experiences were given a larger focus in the formation of national health policies? How much more refined would policies be? Undoubtedly, communication between patients and their clinicians/hospital management will have more prominence in local and national policies. And from high-level policy to on-the-ground realities, issues like how to better communicate with the patient over things like a treatment or healthcare plan would get the attention it so rightfully deserves.

In my recent trip to the Beryl Institute Conference in Dallas, I had the good fortune of meeting with Dr. Tom Scaletta and Julie Danker – who lead patient experience initiatives at the Edward-Elmhurst Hospital – and found out how they manage patient communications. Regarded as one of the leaders in this space with their G.R.E.A.T. coaching techniques, they imparted practical insight into communication and engagement techniques that can help patients and clinicians.

Here are some key takeaways from them:

  • Contact patients the day after ED discharge – it keeps them safe and satisfied
  • Engage patients digitally – it reduces cost and increases reach
  • Automate work processes – it allows charge nurses and case managers to efficiently intervene at the right points in the workflow process
  • Build in an automated response mechanism/module into your systems – it allows for the acknowledgement of compliments and resolution of complaints by ED leaders
  • Measure, measure, measure – use statistically-valid metrics and patient comments to drive provider performance. We can always keep improving.

If you want to know more, watch the video below from our Patient Experience Channel (or check out www.eehealth.org/great)

A Conversation on Patient Experience – Lessons and Case Studies

Patient Centered Care and Patient Engagement are fast becoming buzzwords in healthcare, particularly as the belts continue to tighten and health institutions choose to invest in things that really matter.

As a leading firm that specialises in the field of patient experience and health innovation, we at Energesse decided to launch a Patient Experience Channel, to complement the Patient Experience Australia LinkedIn Group that launched in 2015.

Both initiatives were driven by the need for Australian healthcare professionals to connect, communicate and educate each other on how to diagnose, improve and monitor patient experience. They also provide very practical tips based on learnings and strategies implemented by practitioners around Australia and overseas.

For this first episode of the Patient Experience Channel, I had a conversation with Bernadette Brady, consultant and trainer with PartneringwithPatients. Bernadette and I are highly passionate about helping hospital and healthcare implement simple measures to transform healthcare to the way it should be – thinking about patients first.

In summary, some of the key learnings we highlighted are:

1. Enable patients to take control of their care and be in charge – ask them how they would like to be treated e.g. times they would want to be seen in hospital.

2. Clinicians should change from a ‘to’ mentality, to a ‘with’ mentality, when it comes to treatment program

3. Committees with patient representatives should have at least two of them on it, to ensure voices are heard

4. Learn to manage risk with patient choices – e.g. allowing early discharge from hospital even if there is a risk to patient staying at home – manage that.

5. The most effective solutions to transform care are simple – Every clinician should introduce themselves first. And always SMILE (when appropriate).

6. Celebrate success in Safety and Quality (rather than just focusing on negative events).

7. Consider the SECOND VICTIM ie. clinicians may need care and some protection too, especially when a bad experience occurs.

8. Know the difference between treating the disease and treating the person, the latter should come first.

9. Walk through the wards as if you were a patient one day – how does it feel and what observations about your environment have you made?

I’d love to hear your feedback on Episode 1 – content, length, quality, etc – what other topics around Patient Care would you like to hear about? Are there any experts in this field you’d like to hear from? Let me know and we’ll see what we can do to serve you…

Are we Ready for One Standard Measure of Patient Experience across Australian health?

Most recently, I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at the Improving Healthcare International Convention 2015 on the topic of Patient Experience case studies from the NHS, UK.

There is a growing body of evidence on patient experience measurement and linking financial incentives to them are starting to influence the thinking around patient experience measurement and improvement in Australia.

The last week I was having coffee with Michael Greco, the CEO of Patient Opinion in Australia. Patient Opinion is a website developed in the UK where patients can place elaborate comments, stories and experiences on a platform, such that it increases the transparency of how services are delivered in hospitals. The technology platform from the UK that Energesse introduced is called MES Experience, a multichannel platform for collecting patient feedback (patient experience/satisfaction) data at point-of-care and reporting meaningful analytics for managers.

As we are both heavily involved in mechanisms for improving patient experience through better data, it dawned on us that one of the major challenges in making a difference in Australia (compared to the UK) was that, we still do not have a single, clear national standardised metric for measuring improvement of patient experience.

Within the NHS there has been implementation of a standard measure of patient experience called the ‘Friends and Family Test’. Whilst there has been much debate about the measure over the last 5 years of its implementation, the one thing it has done is has raised the bar on the conversations and investments on how healthcare services should be measured and delivered in a truly patient-centred way, with input from patients.

Australian public hospitals are required to improve quality metrics around patient experience set around Standard 2, one of the 9 quality standards set by the Australian Commission for Safety and Quality in Healthcare. This standard calls for effective partnerships between consumers, healthcare providers and healthcare organisations which are deemed essential for safe and high quality care in national health policy in Australia.1-3

This standard aims to guide health services to become responsive to patient, carer and consumer needs and actually partners with consumers in the implementation of all other NSQHS Standards. However, according to the Commission reports, some health services have found the implementation of systems to meet the requirements of Standard 2 challenging4.

Private sector hospitals on the other hand are utilising their own divergent set of Patient Reported Experience Measures (PREMs), largely based upon surveys from the US healthcare system (HCAHPS) as well as the incorporating from other major payors such as health insurance funds. I’ve had conversations with several CEO’s and Directors of Clinical Governance who have really taken the lead in this space with patient experience measurement, and have evolved their own systems for managing it.

However, it remains clear that in general, Australian health services and hospitals are still at their infancy in terms of executing the latest strategies to collect, analyse, measure and improve patient experience. The lack of a standard national metric and the complexity of survey questions and aggregated data sources can further confuse management decision-making and budget allocation in this space.

Guidance from organisations such as the Picker Institute and Beryl Institute are helpful, yet implementation of these questions do require tailoring to local needs, such as in translation of survey questions to local ethnic languages. There also needs to be electronic mechanisms in place to complement paper-based collection in order to improve response rates, engagement and obtain meaningful insights in real-time.

Most importantly is the need to close the feedback loop and take action from patient experience data. Whilst some ward staff and executives may see this process as a ‘tick-box’ exercise, patient experience data collection is actually a driver for organisational strategy and a source for targeting innovation initiatives with real financial outcomes.

Why?

Because from my years as strategist in the corporate health sector (including for very successful pharmaceutical company with over $1bil in annual revenue), I learned one major fact – organisation that is close to its ‘customer’, is the most financially viable over the long term. Hospitals that are sensitive to understanding the needs and wants of its patients, will be the best performing over the long term.

Analysing patient complaints and frustrations may seem like a dreary task, however these ‘warning signs’ are particularly useful when coming directly from patients or front-line staff. Alleviation of patient concerns in an early stage acts as an ‘early warning system’ that can reduce systemic errors and multi-million dollar lawsuits. There are also often many positive stories that can be effectively shared in the organisation to lift morale and staff engagement.

One of the most neglected aspects of patient feedback is the long form narrative where the rich depth of patient insights often lie. In the business world, market research companies understand that these ‘long form narratives’ provide a rich source of insights on how an organisation should innovate its services. However, one of the reasons many surveys tend not to encourage these narratives is that they are difficult to analyse manually in high volumes.

Fortunately, many technologies now exist that can perform automated free text analysis to extract deeper actionable insights from this type of data and to keep service managers updated. Among them are tools like PanSensic, InVivo and SAS, some of which are customised for analysing patient experience data. Some of these tools are also able to analyse compassion, staff attitude and quality of communication.

From helping implementations of patient experience initiatives, here are 8 tips I’ve observed that can help Clinical Governance and Patient Experience managers:

  1. Have a systematic annual strategy and implementation plan that you’ve shared with a cross section of stakeholders in the hospital.
  2. Design your data collection, analysis and dissemination process so the right person gets the right data at the right time.
  3. How you design the questions for local use and ask the questions is critical – some patients/consumers will love doing a survey electronically at point of care, others may want to do it from home post-discharge – give them options.
  4. Analyse data effectively to translate them into actionable insights. Many ‘big data’ technologies that can save managers time, and perform these tasks more objectively and effectively than humans.
  5. Implement changes through a prioritisation process involving a multi-displinary team (that involves ideally 2 consumer representatives).
  6. Visibly demonstrate the results of feedback and management actions to drive culture change, motivation and results over the long term. Front line clinical staff want to know that their daily hard work is appreciated. It also helps them improve the quality of their care and communication if they understand that these aspects can actually be measured via patient feedback.
  7. Finally, monitor experience with a ward’s performance metrics to ensure that interventions are effective are continuously aligned with patient needs – many wards now have visibly transparent performance dashboards on the ward. The right way to do this is to have 3-4 main high priority metrics visible (not 20 metrics that cannot be easily seen by busy staff)
  8. Have the discipline to iterate the process to achieve continuous improvements to outcomes. Repetition is key to behaviour change. For any person, in any industry.

What are your thoughts on developing one standard metric for patient experience in Australia?

Do check out the Patient Experience Australia LinkedIn Community if you’d like to engage other leaders on this topic.

References

  1. Australian Charter of Healthcare Rights. Commonwealth of Australia, 2008. (Accessed 28 August 2014, at http://www.safetyandquality.gov.au/national-priorities/charter-of-healthcare-rights)
  2. Australian Safety and Quality Framework for Health Care. Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2010. (Accessed 28 August 2014, at http://www.safetyandquality.gov.au/national-priorities/australian-safety-and-quality-framework-for-health-care/)
  3. Australian Safety and Quality Goals for Health Care Partnering with Consumers: Action Guide. ACSQHC, 2012. (Accessed 28 August 2014, at http://www.safetyandquality.gov.au/publications/goal-3-partnering-with-consumers-action-guide/)
  4. Safety and Quality Improvement Guide Standard 2. Partnering with Consumers. Embedding partnerships in Healthcare. Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare. (Accessed 4 December 2015, http://www.safetyandquality.gov.au/publications/safety-and-quality-improvement-guide-standard-2-partnering-with-consumers-october-2012

Executive Guide: 16 Insights Executives Miss in their Customer Data

As both the corporate and healthcare worlds get increasingly consumed with data and analytics, there are many preventable mistakes and lost opportunities that executives experience when determining everyday decisions about their customers or patients. A common scenario is when managers make ‘improvements’ to a product or service, only to find later that their new changes resulted in financial losses, and they don’t really understand WHY.

Often this is due to a lack of developing a deep understanding of customer insights from their own data or research. Commonly, what executives BELIEVE they know about their customers or patients, is largely at a superficial level. In fact, they often ‘don’t know what they don’t know’, and conscious or subconsciously refuse to acknowledge their lack of awareness of customer behaviour. Immature data management leads to a vicious cycle of poor executive decision making.Immature customer data management leads to poor business

The proof of ineffective management decisions lies in the results such as poor customer or patient engagement, low sales volume or high numbers of patient complaints. Mostly these executives also only act when its too late, because they are not fully aware of the ‘preventative’ solutions available to them.

The real tragedy is that customer data is often readily available within an organisation’s own databases and data centers. However, many executives simply don’t know where their data is kept, who to get it from and how to connect the pieces strategically to solve everyday problems. The common excuses are:

16 insights bubbles

Failure to utilise data effectively often translates into poor return on investment on staff time, budgets and resources. On an individual level, executives are penalised, reprimanded or even fired for underperforming and making costly mistakes that they should have picked up on. On an organisational level, it also leads to inability to solve problems or transform outdated business and care models – the lag indicator is when the Chief Financial Officer starts complaining about an unhealthy bottom line.

In our busy worlds, we are inundated with multiple channels of data and information from customer feedback, patient surveys, focus groups, social media posts, emails, website forms, call centers, mobile chat, etc. Many executives don’t know how to effectively make sense of all these valuable data sources particularly with the quantity, speed and variety at which data is coming at us.

In these more demanding environments where customer and patient expectations are greater than ever, what’s often missing is the ability to translate all the data ‘noise’ into meaningful insights and wisdom that changes executive decisions, actions and improve results. It’s often tricky to see the ‘wood from the trees’, particularly when an executive has been in a role for over a year.

Here are 16 of the common mistakes we’ve seen executives, even experienced senior managers, make over and over again. Can you relate to any of them?

 

Data Gathering

1.  We’ve found that most organisations vastly underutilise their existing data. Reasons for this can be lack of technical expertise, lack of awareness of available insights tools and methodologies or lack of time and money. Conversely, many executives spend excessive amounts of time and money implementing poorly researched projects or solutions, which could be greatly enhanced by utilising data and insights currently available.

2.  There is often confusion that more volume of data = better insights. Whilst this can be the case, deep insights come from a combined analysis of quantitative and qualitative data focused on the solving a specific problem. In the current era of ‘big data’, higher volumes provide greater accuracy and new insights, but they can also cause more confusion if the right filters are not applied.

3.  For those that are more data-savvy, there is a heavy reliance on ‘hard’ quantitative data to measure performance. However, in our interviews with leading CEO’s, many are starting to understand that measuring ‘soft’ KPI data measures like culture, compassion, staff attitude and customer frustration provide much better lead indicators to problems like patient complaints, high staff turnover and poor customer retention.

Data Analysis

4. Once datasets and data sources have been aggregated and are easy to access, some executives think “its now time for the data to tell us what to do!” That’s an incorrect way to think about data; its far more effective to think “What are our major business problems or current priorities that we can now use this data to help solve”. This initial approach may then uncover unexpected trends.

5. Actually speaking to customers and patients also = data! Stories and text verbatim from face-to-face meetings, observations, and long answers in surveys are goldmines for WHY problems keep recurring. Whilst such anecdotal data shouldn’t be generalised, it also shouldn’t be ignored completely. These case studies are often the key insights to innovation and improving products and services

6. Executives often do not dig deep into the emotional analysis and root cause of customer frustrations and delights; they often deal with problems at a superficial level and implement quick, superficial solutions. As we move into an era of better understanding of human behaviour, deep emotional analysis of customer and patient experience is fundamental to transforming processes and systems.

7. Once data is organised, they should be used to inform an organisation’s measures of success and how incentives are allocated. However, it’s important to understand which data points are most appropriate for a measure, and that they are collected in a consistent fashion over time.

8. Some executives often extrapolate general industry behavioural data to its own customers – and implement solutions because “everybody else in the industry is doing it”. Customer segments can behave very differently e.g. Gen Y purchasers of health insurance have significantly different expectations to Baby Boomers. A mass-approach loyalty program may only be partially effective, without deep customer understanding.

9. It’s important to integrate perspectives (datasets) from multiple stakeholders to make the best decisions. Relying on purely on senior management instinct or front line staff feedback, may not give you accurate picture of what your customers/ patients think and feel (and vice versa).

10. When it comes to gathering qualitative data (from surveys, etc), many executives either ask the wrong questions or ask the right questions in the wrong way. The emphasis is often on closed questions or Likert scale responses, which are simple to analyse, rather than open questions with rich experiential information from customer narrative or verbatim patient responses.

Data Management

11. Understanding security requirements for how data should be collected, shared and stored is a speciality in itself and most executives do not understand these aspects at all. Many do not really want to either. This is often the realm of the IT and Legal departments and even then it is a highly specialised space requiring specific knowledge of the organisation’s data security protocols. When in doubt – delegate (or outsource) to trusted experts, especially with regard to data security and compliance.

12. Privacy is a related issue – it is important to understand the privacy policy for your organisation. However, privacy can often also be used as an excuse for not sharing information on customers with third parties. This can ultimately lead to resistance to progress, especially when executives are trying to improve a whole customer journey. When deciding on which data to share, it is best to think about what is the ‘highest good’ for customers/patients or no. 1 objective of the organisation. With that principle in mind, one can determine how to best filter, cut and use the data to serve that purpose, within ethical business boundaries.

Actioning Data-Driven Decisions

13. When it comes to decision-making, the process of prioritising solutions to a problem can often be based on subjective insights expressed in a management meeting (e.g. loudest voice, length of tenure, organisational politics, who plays golf with the boss, etc). These decisions may ignore objective feedback from key stakeholders such as customers. This often hurts organisations when they have to look back and try to rationalise why things were done, without any evidence to back the decision.

14. Human beings are obsessed with predicting the future, and things are no different with data. Predictive analysis of data is helping many organisations make big strategic decisions such as ‘which new market do we do diversify into’ as well as tactical decisions such as ‘how to best deploy a new machine asset in our diagnostics area’. However, organisations need to build up to this capability and it is no sense having predictive capabilities if basic operations and customer service are not performing well. Basic operational performance is influenced by how culturally accustomed staff are at using data in their decision-making. This is a capability that can be nurtured over time.

15. Remember, that having valuable insights from your data is are critical starting points in a change journey, and one that need to fundamentally improve in the healthcare industry. Nonetheless, there is no substitute for courageous leadership and sound judgement that comes from experience, and knowing when to ‘believe’ there is adequate data and insights at hand to make a timely decision, and when to look for more information before making one. This is where it is important to be guided by a big picture, holistic view of the organisation and account for other problems or strategic priorities that can influence a final decision.

16. To keep up with the pace of change, health organisations need their data collection, analysis, and decision-making processes to be systemised in order to be effective over the long term. Obtaining useful insights from data is a better start, but having skilled, trained people to take the right actions is absolutely critical.

If you are experiencing challenges with data or would like to have a conversation with us about your business priorities, please contact us. I’d be happy to answer your questions or explore how we may be able to help you use your data to solve your healthcare or business issue.

Health Insurance customer retention – Constructive feedback from our readers

Since the release of our Health Insurance Customer Experience White Paper, we’ve had thought-provoking engagement from health insurance providers, aggregators and customers. These insights uncovered more ‘devil in the detail’ to complement the comprehensive knowledge base in the White Paper.

In terms of observations with customer retention, several funds have had to introduce policies with exclusions, sub-limits and changes to the limits due in order to lower prices and make them more affordable. However, when customers find out later that these changes did not meet their initial expectations and then leave, these products can then become commercially unsustainable and unprofitable over time. This leads insurers to implement more restrictive changes which can further reinforce the ongoing vicious cycle of poorer customer retention.

Customer retention can also be linked to staff retention, particularly on the front line. In Australia, one of the reasons for this is because new staff are recruited into call centre’s particularly during the peak periods of March and June. This is where policy sales increase due to annual price rises and the end of financial year respectively (so tax benefits can be claimed). These new sales staff may not be as well trained on product knowledge or company procedures compared to the usual staff and may provide information that is inaccurate or incomplete.

During this period, the quality of interaction and customer understanding from the call centre may decline and policy sales that occur may be due to aggressive marketing strategies. This is exacerbated by incentives and pressure on front-line sales staff to meet sales targets during a short period of time. It can therefore result in sales of health insurance products that don’t necessarily meet the needs of customers.

There have also been observations on aggregator funds that sell health insurance products on behalf of health insurance funds. To differentiate themselves, these aggregators aim to spend a significant amount of time with customers to understand their real needs and position policies that better suit their needs out of a broader selection. However, they too can sometimes be influenced by policies with the best incentives.

A key issue can occur once a customer has signed up with the aggregator, and their details then have to be handed over to the health insurance fund. This follow up process may occasionally be disjointed. It can result in the customer’s ‘old’ fund continuing to deduct monthly payments while the new fund (that the customer has just switched to) has also begun to deduct payments. Many of these handovers can be messy and as a result cause a lot of customer dissatisfaction and complaints because it relies on coordination between entirely different organisations.

In some cases, this coordination may be seamless, but in others there are competitive reasons why this coordination may be challenging for the customer. This is when the old funds ‘win-back’ teams are not alerted to contact the customer and try and win back the customer that’s looking to change. Although there are regulations to prevent any inappropriate actions from occurring, however there are nuances that allow funds to utilize a variety of different tactics when it comes to trying to retain that customer.

Ultimately, behavior that ends up frustrating customers will cost either the aggregator or the health fund in the short, medium, or long-term, by departure of that customer. Insurers should decide what is in the best interest of the customers when making these decisions before creating solutions or changes to the process.

If you’d like to learn more on ways to empower consumers and improve experience in the health journey, join us in Melbourne for a  breakfast event called Building a Sustainable, Patient-Centred Healthcare System on Oct 30, 2015, 7.30 AM to 10.30 AM (AEST).  Download the brochure here.  Our breakfast event in Sydney was a great success, so if you happen to be in Melbourne, please join us if you are available, and feel free to pass on this invitation to your colleagues in healthcare. Click here to REGISTER

Many thanks to our readers who contributed their knowledge to this article – but who did not wish to be acknowledged – you know who you are!

In your experience, what have you observed in terms of the process of switching health insurance policies?

Empowering Health Journeys by improving Patient Experience (PX)

Improving the Patient Experience or ‘PX’ is becoming an increasingly important objective and metric in our hospitals. While this concept has taken a while to catch on in Australia (compared to countries like the UK), it is encouraging that it is part of many hospitals’ accreditation process these days. Some health CEO’s have stated that a closer eye on PX acts as an ‘early warning system’ to pick up underlying quality and safety issues that may be occurring.

As a parallel story, my 3 years developing start-ups in the technology industry enlightened me to the tech industry’s an absolute obsession with User Experience (UX). A successful technology platform has to be so customer focussed and understand a user’s behaviour in such detail, that it could predict the next 10-20 moves of customer journey and make it as pleasant and effortless as possible, so they don’t have to choose any other option.

Google staff used to say “Remember, our competitor is just one click away”, referring to the ease in which someone could make a choice to switch service if they were dissatisfied. I believe this attitude, combined with data analytics capability, will make Google and Apple major health players in the future, once they understand how traditional health systems work.

How would a strong discipline of improving PX help the health and wellbeing of all Australians?

Like in any system, consumers that are more empowered are more likely to push improvements in the system. In the case of healthcare, particularly in the public sector, users (i.e. patients) may not always have a choice as to which doctor, nurse or specialist they see. This occasional lack of choice therefore disempowers individuals who are then not incentivised to drive innovation in the system.

If that psychology around ‘walking in a patient’s shoes’, empowering them with choices and improving PX can be harnessed, today’s predictive analytics and technology could easily modify behaviours that result in reduced obesity, diabetes and other chronic conditions, simply by making it as effortless and pleasant as possible to do so. These technologies, like the Fitbit for individuals and MES Experience, a digital patient survey platform for hospitals, can analyse feedback data quickly so changes can be made rapidly.

If you’d like to learn more on ways to empower consumers and improve experience in the health journey, you may have received the invitation last week for the breakfast event called Building a Sustainable, Patient-Centred Healthcare System on Aug 11, 2015, 7.30 AM to 10.30 PM (AEST) | Sydney.  Please join us if you are available, or feel free to pass on this invitation to your colleagues in healthcare. Click here to REGISTER

Wellness Bloggers and the Gaps in the Health System

I was approached by an ECU Daily journalist a couple of weeks ago in regards to the Popularity of controversial Wellness bloggers like Belle Gibson is a side-effect of major gaps in health system.

See below some insights I shared with Danielle Austin of ECU Daily:

How should Consumers approach Wellness Information on the internet?

  • Consumers should exercise a degree of care when looking for wellness information online. Whilst this is the predominant method of research for the vast majority of people these days, it is much harder to make a distinction on ‘what’s right for them’.

Where should people seek their medical information and how can they be sure that health information they read on the internet is not fraudulent?

  • Depends on the type of health information they are looking for. If due to a medical illness, they should consult their doctor or qualified health professional
  • Do research online to see if the website is supported by such institutions or purely commercial interests.
  • A good example of a credible site would be the Betterhealthchannel.vic.gov.au, which was created by the Victorian government. However, the user-friendliness of design and content could be improved significantly, and this is where a lot of credible sites are managing poorly. Consumers then take to other more ‘attractive’ sites by celebrities and big brands.

How should consumers approach celebrity endorsed diets/ health claims (e.g. Pete Evans Paleo for babies)?

  • Celebrities are entitled to their opinion on what products and services they wish to recommend. However, consumers should do a check that the health results are verified by independent scientific bodies, which determines the validity of those claims. Every person is an individual with individual needs in terms of diet, exercise, mental, social and environmental needs. They should consult qualified health professionals if they have specific health needs. They should also listen to their bodies in terms of any concerning symptoms, and consult a health professional.

How can cancer patients, and patients of other illnesses, find wellness programs to support them without giving them false medical information?

  • Patients with severe illness should ask their doctor, hospital or qualified health professional about wellness programs that are right for them. Some hospitals such as the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse (affiliated with RPA) and Olivia Newton John Cancer Wellness centre in Melbourne (Austin Health), all are affiliated with hospitals.
  • In Perth there is the Solaris Care Centre which has provided good quality wellness care. They all have a good track record or providing care, support ongoing research and are affiliated with medical professionals in some way.

Read the full ECU Daily article here

How about you, what are your thoughts on this topic? Do share your comments and suggestions with me and the Energesse wellness community. I look forward to hearing from you.

Medicare Review by Minister Ley needs to remove ‘Vicious Cycle’ of healthcare politics

Ministers Ley’s recently announced review of Medicare has largely been welcomed, however it remains to be seen whether it will dig ‘deep enough’. A multidisciplinary review of Federal Government payment mechanism is warranted as the current ‘fee-for-service’ model incentivises ‘doing as much as possible, for as many as possible’. This can lead to inappropriate testing, procedures, financial waste and even potential harm. A new strategy is required to break the cycle of rising costs, as demonstrated in the Future Solutions in Australian Healthcare White Paper, which interviewed 21 leading health experts on how to reform the health system. ‘Out of the box’ strategies included delinking healthcare spending from political intervention, such as with the Reserve Bank and interest rates.

Read the full article from The Australian