Executives in some industries may argue that digital transformation is optional, but when a market disruption upends an industry as dramatically as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) did for health insurance, then such transformation is an absolute must.
Furthermore, the state healthcare marketplaces the ACA mandates are suddenly pushing these insurers into cutthroat competition with each other, putting the consumer in control. Digital transformation is essential for success in this new world of healthcare.
Raising the Stakes on Health Insurance Marketing
Before the ACA, health insurers mostly marketed through brokerages and to large employers. Now, “with health insurance reform, every insurance company is trying to be more consumer-focused,” according to Bhavesh Shah, Director of Search Strategy and Marketing Analytics at integrated managed care consortium Kaiser Permanente.
Before health reform, “Kaiser Permanente’s business was mostly B2B and Medicare with some individual business,” Shah continues. “Now the individual business is a big focus area driving significant growth.”
Predictably, Kaiser Permanente’s marketing effort has taken the brunt of this new consumer focus. The ACA has “made healthcare marketing a much bigger consumer marketing play,” Shah says. However, challenges abound – not just at Kaiser Permanente, but at all health insurance companies battling it out on the health exchanges.
On the one hand, consumers are also new to this process, and struggle to understand which plan is best for them and how best to pay for it. On the other hand, the plans themselves are still overly complicated, as insurers struggle to clarify them. The result is widespread confusion. “The marketer doesn’t know what the consumer is looking for,” Shah explains. “This is where old and new worlds collide.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2014/10/30/obamacare-drives-digital-transformation-at-health-insurers/.
Bhavesh Shah will be speaking on “Big Data – A Marketer’s Rorschach Test” at the Big Data & Marketing Innovation Summit in Miami November 6 – 7. He will discuss how to identify the blind spots as marketers try to track and respond to the consumer journey.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: 401(K) 2012.
