Raising the bar for health plan member experience

At Recharge 2022, hundreds of health plan leaders joined Wellframe for a full day of informational sessions filled with industry insights, innovative updates, and strategies for success in digital health.

Whether you missed watching Recharge 2022 live, or just want to revisit insights from throughout the day, you’re in the right place. Here’s our recap of the key themes from Recharge 2022.

It’s clear that providing a best-in-class member experience begins with the right design mindset. Keynote speaker Clare Muscutt noted the importance of intentionally designing every aspect of members’ health plan journeys in ways that truly engage and delight. Other panelists returned to the theme of design during many sessions, including when Wellframe’s Alyssa Alsheimer and Linkwell’s Nathan Adams introduced Wellsquared, a new offering for designing member journeys supported by personalized service journalism content.

Members bring their everyday consumer experiences and expectations into their interactions with health plans, which too often are unable to compete on experience. Building intuitive, human-centered design into the member experience — at every touchpoint, across every channel — is a great way for plans to set themselves apart from the competition and connect more deeply with members, the way members really want to be connected with.

The pandemic sparked a surge of interest in telehealth and digital health solutions, which went from “nice to have” status to a universal “need to have” virtually overnight. As Wellframe founder Jake Sattelmair shared, we’ve all learned a lot from the recent proliferation of digital health tools, but the greatest lesson of all has been that in the healthcare industry, digital solutions can never fully replace the human touch. 

The role of technology in healthcare is to augment and enhance the human expertise of providers, care managers, and health plans — making it easier to help more patients and members in more personalized and connected ways than ever before. The human element is a crucial part of why members of all ages and cultures tend to find health tech so easy to use. For them, platforms like Wellframe serve as a direct digital line to a human expert who can help, as panelist Dr. Josette Gordon-Simet observed.

Every health plan has members, but not every health plan has always made the most of their relationships with members. Building a foundation of trust and communication with members is new for many health plans, and as Jake Sattelmair and other panelists shared, it’s important to remember that member relationships are a privilege for health plans, not a right.

This means that, as panelists Annalisa Cooper and Rachel Daricek discussed, plans can’t simply build digital tools and automatically expect their members to use them — if you build it, they won’t come unless you show them the authentic value they’ll receive. That’s why digital transformation isn’t enough, in and of itself. Health plans need to approach new tools with a Member Advocacy mindset to create personalized experiences that members naturally engage with, and deliver curated, value-driven journeys that lead members to improved health outcomes.

The original focus for Wellframe was as a tool specifically for populations with chronic conditions and serious clinical needs; a way to make it easier for these individuals to manage their health. As panelist Somaneh Bouba Diemé shared, it is essential for everyone to feel they belong in the healthcare system; there need to be ways to make healthcare work for everyone. This philosophy is still at the heart of what drives the Wellframe platform, and it was a theme throughout many of the sessions at Recharge 2022.

Some have written off digital health solutions as technological frivolities, but the ability of these tools to reach underserved populations is anything but frivolous. As panelist Michele Gabron shared, Wellframe enables access to populations that can’t always be reached by phone. Success stories shared by many panelists showed that members of various ages, abilities, ethnicities, and cultures have been able to connect more closely with their health plans, and their personal health, through the intuitive communication methods built into the Wellframe platform.