Will Partnerships and Mergers Breathe Life into Consumer Health Engagement?

Interest from consumers in personal wellness programs has skyrocketed in the last few years, with growing consumer technology applications in the area using wearables, insightful analytics, gamification, and social engagement. The upside of all this progress can be shared by various industry stakeholders—insurance companies pay less premiums, hospitals have better care compliance and less readmissions, employers can manage group care, and most importantly, consumers are proactively engaged in improving their health. Due to the need for diverse solutions to cater to all these industry stakeholders, HfS sees companies of various types coming forward with solutions in this emerging market category, “consumer health engagement.”

Sourcing providers add another dimension to this mix, as they are often the healthcare provider and payers’ representatives to their customers, and manage large parts of their backend operations. This makes an interesting opportunity for them to step in and contribute more value to their clients through the emerging personal wellness market. An example of this was EXL’s recent partnership announcement with Novu.

EXL already provides services and a platform, CareRadius, for care and case management. A healthcare organization—either by itself or through a BPO arrangement with EXL—can use CareRadius to aggregate data from various sources and identify and stratify members to identify those who should be in health management programs. Healthcare organizations and networks can also use the solution to evaluate patients, and generate care plans. But, it’s not enough to have a care plan. The next critical piece is the engagement.

This is where Novu fits in.  While EXL’s platform, clinicians, and services can help payers and providers manage care planning and coordination, Novu helps in reaching out to touch and connect with the patients and members, creating extended but personalized networks.  Novu has digitally-enabled programs to attract people into activities that are designed to be personalized enough to change behaviors and create new habits. It also adds the option of participating in organized peer networks sometimes led by care managers. The activities weave in online challenges, games and incentivized programs, and social communities, designed to fit the individual. The program frequency and intensity of interaction depends on people’s profiles (e.g., condition, age, propensity to engage) and care plans.

With the increase in use of social and digital technologies, there are more ways then ever to create connections between doctors and hospitals and insurance plans with people to help execute care plans, or extend across the care continuum and promote wellness before care plans are even needed.

A number of sourcing providers are making investments to create these links for their clients, including Xerox with its acquisition of RSA Medical, and Hinduja Global Services with its acquisition of Colibrium. HfS has identified many players in the “consumer health engagement” market that are providing interactive tools, education, and game and incentive-based programs. These players typically have focused on an angle like gamification or education, and are working to gain foothold, brand, and scale.  One way to find this is in combination with established sourcing providers. We expect more collaboration through acquisitions, partnerships and alliances in this space as service providers personalize their approaches to consumer health engagement.