The forecast for health insurance is a little cloudy these days, with uncertainty over the ACA and the demise of the American Healthcare Act. While health payers are questioning their ability to offer plans on many health exchanges, one by-product of the ACA is drawing broad-based support from payers, providers, and politicians. With a proven track record of cutting costs and improving patient health, value-based care looks like it’s here to stay, regardless of future changes to health insurance.
With its emphasis on coordination of care, data analytics, and patient engagement, value-based care offers some valuable lessons for the C-suite when it comes to crafting business correspondence and regulated documents. By adopting the principles of value-based care as a communication strategy, executives and marketing teams can improve customer engagement and increase the ROI of their business correspondence and marketing collateral.
To capitalize on value-based care principles, businesses must find ways to promote cross-functional coordination, leverage big data, and promote customer engagement. Here are some suggestions for implementing a value-based communication strategy in your business:
- Define your goals for communicating with consumers. Are you looking for more qualified leads? Do you want to increase sales for new products and services among existing customers? Are you looking for ways to retain customers by improving engagement and satisfaction? Defining specific goals is crucial to value-based communication, because you can’t measure success until you define what success means.
- Use evidence-based communication. Healthcare organizations rely on measurable indicators of patient outcomes to determine whether treatments are effective and to award payments. Whether you rely on customer satisfaction surveys, increased sales, or customer retention rates, you must identify how you will measure success using quantifiable metrics.
- Leverage big data to target communications, upsell products, and maximize ROI. Once you’ve identified your performance metrics, you’ll need to collect and analyze data to draw meaningful conclusions about your customer demographics and target your communications to the needs of individual consumers. ealIn today’s evolving digital ecosystem, your communication solution must integrate with CRMs and other software, mobile technology, and smart devices. The solution must pull data in multiple formats from multiple sources and formats and merge that data with content to generate correspondence that can be delivered through multiple channels.
- Promote cross-functional coordination. Too often, business users and subject matter experts exist in departmental silos and rely on manual processes to compose, design, approve, and produce customer communications. With the emergence of SaaS communication solutions, businesses can centralize content in the cloud and automate workflows so that business users and subject matter experts from across the organization can access information on demand from any location to design, compose, review, and approve communications. A solution that leverages role-based access privileges, secure cloud hosting, and robust audit capabilities enables companies to secure information while maximizing cross-functional collaboration.
- Optimize Business Processes. Relying on an out-of-the-box communication solution won’t be of much use unless you’ve taken the time to analyze and optimize your business processes, so look for a communication solution that includes support from experienced, knowledgeable team of solutions architects, professional services, and technical personnel that can support you at each stage of deployment, from inception and implementation to onboarding and beyond.
- Create an unforgettable user experience. Value-based communication is all about outcomes and positive outcomes depend on customer engagement. Measurable indicators like retention rates, increased investment in new products and services, and customer feedback speak volumes about customer satisfaction. To promote and measure consumer engagement, your solution must deliver correspondence through multiple channels, particularly digital, in the format consumers prefer, when they want it. (Read more about leveraging technology to improve customer engagement here.)
Value-based communication can yield improved outcomes in the form of customer engagement, retention, and business growth, while reducing costs associated with inefficient processes and siloed resources. By adopting the core components of value-based care, you can craft a winning communication strategy that achieves your business goals using measurable indicators of success.
