Episode 5: The road to Customer 360

Q&A

Tell us a little bit about HAP. Who are your typical members, demographics, some information to ground us in your business?

HAP is a subsidiary of Henry Ford Healthcare, a large health system headquartered in Detroit. They own hospitals, physician groups, outpatient pharmacies, running that gamut. So, between us and Henry Ford, we're an integrated system. We're soup to nuts. It's unique because we’ve got the provider and the payer. For this digital data conversation, we are in a very unique position because we can provide a complete view of that healthcare consumer experience.

We offer commercial, self-funded products, but we're in government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Those were the big growth engines in southeast Michigan. The population is aging, so it's not an employer group who they're buying those things from. It's very competitive and customer experience means a lot when you're trying to succeed in those market segments.

You've both been working closely with a new element of HAP called Member 360. Could you tell us a little bit about what that is?

Member 360 is the idea that we're trying to shift our focus away from data points and toward the customer. So really we're saying, instead of starting from the top and working down, let's start from the bottom and work up. From the customer's perspective, how do we understand everything about any one of our patients or one of our members? 

You put a focus on member versus patient. Why is that? Why is member your noun of choice?

Because we're all in this together; our members are in this with us, we're in this with them. We're trying to say, “you're not just someone we're supplying a product to. You're a member of our company, a member of our family, a member of the Henry Ford Health System at a greater level.” And so when we focus that way, we can start understanding how to best service these real members, these real people. It's not just the patient. They're not just with us while they're in the hospital bed; they're with us throughout their lives. They're members of our organization. We like to treat them as such.

What prompted HAP to begin analyzing the need to create a golden record as part of your initiative? Where did the idea come from?

It was a couple years ago when I had a meeting with an individual who was leading the healthcare division of a major retailer. And this individual came out of healthcare–making consumer products and consumer goods was new to him. During this conversation, he mentioned how this major retailer can produce consumer insights in nanoseconds. Of all the things we talked about in that meeting, that was the one thing that scared me the most; if a company can come into healthcare and produce consumer insights in nanoseconds, they could put a lot of us out of business. That's just not traditionally how healthcare organizations have operated. And that led to a lot of conversations about how we transform our company, and we decided we wanted to become that: a company that can transform consumer insights in nanoseconds.

When you think about the architecture, it's complicated. One of our major takeaways was: how do we harness all this data and make that data consumer-focused? We have data warehouses,  data lakes, and data that still resides in core applications. We also have business partners that have a tremendous amount of data on our customers. There's a lot of power in that data. You can get a tremendous view of the customer experience. And our first thinking in this journey started with: how do we get that comprehensive view of that healthcare customer experience? Because being an integrated system, we have that opportunity, which is different than who we compete against, the large national payers.

What does being digital mean to you?

All these fun front-end digital tools are the fire that's driving this conversation. But data's the oxygen–and if you cut off the oxygen, the fire's going to go out. In this digital economy–which I think of more like the data economy–who's really going to go far and go fast are those organizations that can provide consumer insights in nanoseconds. That's who's going to win this digital game.

Show Notes
2:05 - About HAP
3:10 - What is Member 360?
3:50 - Why does HAP call its customers “members”?
4:26 - Why did HAP pursue the idea of The Golden Record
6:19 - Emphasis on using data, harnessed through Member 360
8:10 - Insights in nanoseconds - how it shifted HAP’s focus on value
10:22 - Layering data breeds more member insights
11:41 - Does Member 360 position HAP ahead of healthcare industry?
14:20 - How HAP is upskilling its workforce
15:54 - How Member 360 is leveraged for lower costs, better outcomes, improved patient experience and improved clinician experience
18:42 - Using insights from other industries
21:22 - Books or articles that influenced architecture
22:18 - Will the Member 360 initiative ever be complete?
25:18 - Keeping the end in mind when requesting data
29:00 - What’s next on the journey for Member 360
31:09 - How Member 360 aligns with future goals
33:54 - What does digital mean to you?

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