Robin Wright King Discusses Helping Consumers Understand Complex Health Plans

Health plans are complex and in order to help members better understand their plans, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is offering more tools from start to finish and obtaining more member input, said Robin Wright King, MBA, director of CDH Product Management at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.

Transcript (modified)

How has the new healthcare environment necessitated a change in the health plans being offered?

As many people know, high-deductible health plans and many other health plans are complex for members to understand, and so we’re doing a couple things to help our members better understand their plans. The first thing that we’re doing at our plan is creating a brand new offering called our “private-label offering,” or our “white-label offering,” for our financial accounts. And essentially what that means is we’ll be able to marry together the health plan with a Blue-branded set of financial accounts. By doing that we’re able to help our members have an end-to-end experience that will be a Blue experience, and it will also be an experience where we can have impact and influence across the entire end-to-end relationship with a member as they use their health plan, as they use their financial account, and as they use the tools and resources to support their account.

The second activity that we are engaged in now is what we’re calling a “CDH journey mapping exercise” and what we’re trying to do there is to truly understand the member experience. And we’re trying to understand it from the voice of the member or from the member’s perspective. So we’re doing some research now where we’re gathering information directly from some of our members about their experiences with us, what their paying points are, what some of their critical moments are as they engage with us, and what perhaps are some of the opportunities that we can glean from that data, or research to help us to deliver a more effective experience for our members.

Those are the 2 major projects that we have underway that are really a result, I think, of some of the benefit designs; they might be a little bit more complex but again we’re trying to help our members to better understand their health plan and we’re trying to do a better job in engaging with them.