Hello, everyone, and thank you for tuning in to the Becker's health care podcast. We are on-site at Becker's fall payer issues roundtable and are thrilled to be joined today by Russ VanGorp, associate managing director with Publicis Sapient. Russ, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks, Brian. Great to be here. Great to have you. Can can you just to set the stage here, can you introduce yourself, share a few pertinent details about your your professional
background and your work in health care? Yeah. Absolutely. I work at Publicis Sapient. I'm in our payer health strategy practice. And and what that means is we partner with our health care clients to make care more accessible, affordable, and consumer friendly in a digital world. And so a lot of the the transformation agenda around around digital innovation is where I where I play. Excellent. Well, great to have you here. Let's
let's dig in. And, you know, we hear many leaders in the Paris space are really talking about and expecting health care to become more consumer centric, be it through virtual care or more customized care options. And the hope is these trends will help historically underserved communities as well sort of get get access to care and increase health care literacy as well, health care have an educational impact there.
So can you talk a little bit about how you approach consumer engagement and and what trends you're seeing that that's making an impact for those folks today? Yeah. It's it's a good question. I mean, engaging members is tricky. Their their health is kinda constantly changing. Their coverage is also changing. They're switching plans. And this makes it even harder in underserved communities when, you know, basic needs kinda take
priority. And so, you know, our research has shown that what matters most to people is is really their quality of life, and that's a personal choice and and being able to spend time with family, friends, and and really be healthy to do those types of things. And so engagement really has to focus on what the consumer cares about. And this starts even before someone really becomes a member, by guiding them through their plan options.
Not just based on, you know, cost or network, but on things like, you know, their chronic conditions, aging with peace of mind, those things that allow them to kind of do the things that they wanna do. Right. Right. And it's different for everyone. Right? That's right. And, and I think there's a lot of new tools and and opportunities to to engage differently. I think plans, you know, historically have been a very business out approach to how they engage with their members. And I think there's
really yeah. With generative AI and AI, I think there's really an opportunity to actually have a consumer in approach Okay. And actually hear, you know, from them around what their needs are and being able to to talk back to them in in the context of the plan and how they meet those needs. Yeah. It's some some excitement there around AI sort of to enhance communications and engagement in that way.
I I did I did see a recent survey that did find though that many health care organizations might be overlooking key factors for successful implementation for for that technology, though. How how are payers specifically responding and and driving impact through technology here, and and and what are the those those things, those factors that folks shouldn't overlook? Yeah. I would say payers are making progress, but there's still a lot of work to
be done. And a lot of this is driven, you know, the internal silos that make it really hard. And, you do utilizing data in a meaningful way to consumers is is still a big challenge. And so I would say it's all about prioritizing. You gotta start small. You gotta clean the right data. You gotta set up the tools with the proper governance and the human oversight. And over time, the goal is to move more to a direct to consumer activation.
But we need to build the trust, and we need to validate the AI models first. And the power of Gen AI really lies in the collection of that first party data. Mhmm. And that's really gonna be a competitive advantage going forward is really understanding your consumers and be able to segment them really with how they talk and how they you know, the needs that they actually provide you, directly, you know, through a digital channel. Yeah.
The data is really everything. Isn't it? Like, it it's it's not gonna be the the technology is not gonna be as effective if you don't got the right data. Right? Truly is. And I think the notion of, you know, if you're able to we're actually working with some of our clients right now around AI driven search and conversational AI type chat tools. Still still yet a lot of work to
be done on those. But the idea of being able to have a a member or a prospect to be able to talk about their health and their in their own language and their own words and be able to capture that first party data and be able to structure that in a way that you can actually use it throughout the plan year. And and you can remind them if they talked about an elective procedure during the shopping
experience. Mhmm. You can bring that up during the plan year and personalized engagement in a way that actually meets them with their needs. That's that's mind blowing difference in the payer landscape. Yeah. And and when you when you think about that specific, that personalized consumer engagement, are other industries doing this better, that that in health care? And I think I I kinda know the answer to that.
But but wanna get your take in terms of what lessons can be learned from other industries who would really sort of nailed this in a way that that health care hasn't yet. Yeah. Absolutely. That proves the statement. We actually work with a lot of the the largest consumer and retail brands out there. One example is, you know, we we partner with Delta in driving a lot of their personalization,
on all of their channels. And, not necessarily something we worked on, but what I really you know, one example at Delta is, you know, their year end review type statement that actually provides you some context around what you did use that year and the value of that. I think a lot of these principles can be applied in the health care setting, you know, to actually understand, you know, be proactive, be helpful, provide context as to, you know, those those things that they
could utilize to improve their health. You know, I think a lot of that in consumer and retail is a bit easier because the data is a little bit cleaner. Back to the data again. But I think, you know, as you start small and identify what those use cases are, you can you can clean that data and and actually provide some of those experiences that relate to kinda game change the the, overall member engagement experience. Yeah. And and to be fair to health
care, right, health care's hard. Healthier's health care's complicated. So, coming to it with a clean set of data is a little bit more challenging than in other industries. Right? Right. That's right. So, at at SAP, you focus on data interoperability and enhancing the experience for for consumers and clinicians alike. How is your approach making a difference? And what should what can other leaders, I guess, listening to this learn from your approach?
Yeah. I I where we, start with our clients is, largely with the business. And we we help them understand what is the consumer and the business value that they wanna drive
and started working backward from that. And so we use integrated kinda capability teams across strategy, product, experience, engineering in a pod formation to be able to take that use case or that value pool, unpack it, and actually look at, you know, the data and the technology that are essential to that to that engagement strategy. And it's it's not looking at trying to, you know, grab all the data and make it all interoperable.
It's really focusing on what is that consumer and business value they wanna drive, and what is the relevant data that's attached to that. Yeah. Really having a at the onset, know where you wanna be, know where the finish line is. Exactly. Yeah. Anything else you'd like to share with with listeners that we didn't touch on or anything you wanna reemphasize as well? I think this the only thing is, you know, member engagement is an ongoing journey. It's never really done.
I think the key is to really start somewhere and celebrate, you know, the wins along the way, track performance, baseline, and measure improvement. Yep. Excellent. Well, Russ, it's been a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you. Well, I thank Russ again for taking the time to come on the podcast, and I wanna thank Publicis Sapient for sponsoring today's content. To our listeners, thank you for joining us, and please be sure to check out other
Becker's podcasts. Have a wonderful rest of your day.