Five Questions for Rachel Sokol with Advisory Board on Frictionless Healthcare Experiences

By Claire Thayer

Rachel Sokol, Managing Director, Payer Research, Advisory Board participated in a Healthcare Web Summit webinar on The Financial Case for a Frictionless Experience.  The discussion highlighted several areas of frictions that highly impact cost of care use, satisfaction and retention efforts and where payers and health systems might think about prioritizing their experience improvement initiatives. If you missed this engaging webinar presentation, you’ll want to be sure to watch the Webinar Video. After the webinar, we interviewed Rachel on five key takeaways: 
 

1. What are a few of the common consumer experience initiatives that health plans are investing in?

Rachel Sokol: The biggest investments we see from plans center around the digital experience – so many plans building new websites, member-only portals, and apps.

2. Your focus of the presentation is on member friction and how this correlates with costly care use. How do you define “friction” from the consumer’s perspective?

Rachel Sokol: We define a “friction” as anything that prevents a consumer from easily and intuitively achieving their goals causing the consumer to hesitate or abandon the health care interaction altogether.

3. Continuing with the discussion on "friction" - what are some of the friction points that would result in a health plan member choosing to go out of network for care services?

Rachel Sokol: The biggest frictions we see leading to out of network use are discrepancies between what the insurer and what the provider say regarding service or physician coverage.

4. Your study points out that members aren't willing to wait for care, even at convenient sites like urgent care and telehealth.  What insights or suggestions do you have for health plans to improve member access?

Rachel Sokol: We’d suggest that plans make it easier for members to access these sites by pre-registering them wherever possible and making the process as familiar as they can with training and promotional materials.

5. To best manage the full member experience cycle, do health plans need to own physician practices in order to reach high levels of member service standards?

Rachel Sokol: Plans don’t have to own practices to offer a seamless experience – but if they don’t, they’ll need a strategy to compete with the expectations set by those that do.  If not ownership, close partnership will be essential to making sure that members have access to high value physicians ready to provide personalized care.