Incentives and Communications

Everybody looking at the healthcare system understands that incentives and alignment of goals is a critical component for successful change.

• Providers need to be motivated to focus on wellness and prevention.
• Individuals need to be motivated to care about the cost of care and to act in a healthy manner.
• Pharmacists need to be motivated to take the extra action of moving patients to lower cost agents, resolving administrative edits, and counseling patients.
• Hospitals need to be motivated to focus on Six Sigma type process initiatives.
• Health Plans need to be motivated to invest in long-term care initiatives that prevent people from getting sick.
• PBMs need to be motivated to drive optimal prescription use even if that includes more over-the-counter (OTC) drugs.
• Employers need to be motivated to offer benefit plans to cover their employees which are simple to understand and align employees with healthy outcomes.
• Pharmaceutical manufacturers need to be motivated to drive adherence across clinical conditions and to bring new drugs to market that represent significant improvements in therapy (better outcomes, less side effects, easier deliver methods).

With that in mind, I am glad that Silverlink Communications announced this morning that we are partnering with IncentOne to incorporate incentives into our communication programs.  Going forward, incentives will offer us another lever to improve outcomes in our programs that we conduct for clients.

“If applied appropriately in healthcare, incentives are an influential lever to motivate healthcare behaviors, arguably the most powerful force for changing the economics of healthcare,” said Stan Nowak, CEO and co-founder of Silverlink. “We’re excited to be partnering with IncentOne to design highly flexible, personalized and incentive-driven outreach that enables health plans to better connect with and engage their members to drive healthcare behaviors and reward them at the same time.”

“This is a truly integrated technology partnership that seamlessly connects healthcare consumer participation to incentives,” said Michael Dermer, CEO at IncentOne. “Silverlink and IncentOne together can deliver complementary solutions that drive participation and ultimately cost savings in healthcare. The combination of our expertise in finding the right incentives and Silverlink’s personalized communications to drive consumer behavior delivers the ability to implement more effective programs.”

Matthew Holt (author of The Healthcare Blog) did a podcast with both the CEOs yesterday that you can listen to to learn more.

You can also look at a study by Hewitt Associates of large employers which covers several related topics:

• 2/3rds plan to offer incentives to motivate sustained health care behavior change.
• 67% will utilize health care data and measurements to drive their organization’s health care strategy.
• 74% of employees think their employer should help them understand how to use their health plan better.
• 12% of employees think employers should help them become healthier.
• Employee decisions on healthcare were influenced by cost:
  • Nearly one-third (30 percent) said they did not go to the doctor when they were sick because of cost.
  • 27 percent didn’t fill a prescription given by a doctor.
  • Almost one in five (19 percent) stopped taking medications before their prescription ran out, and of those, 18 percent did so due to finances.

Certainly, there are numerous examples of incentives being used to drive behavior.  Moving patients to evaluate mail order pharmacy has been a solution where coupons have been used over th years.  Driving therapeutic conversions have used incentives in the form of copay waivers.  Getting patients to complete health risk assessments (HRAs) and other tools have given incentives.

The interesting component will be the personalization of incentives.  While I may enjoy a $10 gift card to the dog store, my wife may enjoy a $10 gift card to the spa.  Flexibility of incentives and alignment of incentives with what drives behavior will be important.