What if you could get medical information back on the same day you received a customer application?
Such a capability would confer significant strategic value to you, and consequently it is one of our objectives for the Australian life market. What about receiving medical information back 40% faster than standard models? Granted, that is not as powerful as same-day-delivery, but it is nonetheless a valuable proposition. Plus, it has one key advantage: our research says that it is achievable now.
Innovation combines vision with discipline
We are all motivated by the powerful future state visions that can be achieved with the right combination of technology, creativity, and self-belief. At the same time, we must not overlook an equally valuable principle: significant innovation benefit is realisable immediately and continuously from the disciplined, methodical, iterative improvements that form the basis of your innovation pathway.
Customer acquisition, a ripe space for innovation
Customer acquisition is a great context to explore opportunities for improved outcomes and efficiencies, since every single person reading this article will want more customers with lower friction. One of the great things about this context is there are so many components that are examinable, if you have the right tools. Every element of the process has known time-cost impacts and revenue potentials. Our strong impression is that the Australian market has immense potential for improvement in this critical domain.
Our business is to provide you the infrastructure and service to securely and quickly obtain the medical information you need to make a contract offer or manage a claim effectively. Wrapped around this we offer analytics and an approach that promotes testing, learning and improving. Consequently this article will focus on our experience in this aspect of customer acquisition, to highlight a data-driven approach to realising value in the short term while working along a longer term transformation programme.
Using data to speed up medical retrieval is no longer optional
From your own data you’ll intimately understand that the likelihood of acquiring a new customer is inversely related to the cycle time for their application. For some products, getting medical information from a medical provider is the largest friction point in the customer journey. Doctors are busy, do not prioritise filling in any form, especially insurance forms.
The chart below is an example from a hypothetical medical requirement request.
We love this graph, and we hope you do too. It breaks down the entire medical acquisition process by time, showing the various delays that accrue into overall turnaround time.
We can supplement that view with additional data. The following chart shows the relative overall turnaround times for sites using a digital clinical management system integrated smart form vs a standard approach.
The way that we see these graphs, extracted from our operational processes, is that they help you make a business decision about the resources that ought to be allocated to fixing a problem and the expected financial returns for doing so. What is it worth to your business, to shorten the process by 4 or more days? If you do think that it’s a commercially great decision and you are prepared to allocate resources, you now face the business challenge of how to effect those changes. This is a great opportunity for innovation.
Smarter levers for doctor engagement
You are also armed with other options for getting the outcomes you want. One of these is the amount you pay doctors. Money can be extremely effective, but it is also a blunt instrument that does not make it easier for the doctor to write a report, nor ensure an accurate report. A purely economic approach would deny the strong evidence that communication strategies combined with user experience considerations can induce desired response behaviours.
Built in Enquiry: Driving smarter, faster decisions
Our contribution to this iterative innovation is by providing:
- the infrastructure that allows you to test and implement your business strategies and hypotheses; and
- an integration with medical practice software to create opportunities to improve processes and then measure the impact.
For example, if more of your medical reports can be pre-populated with patient data such as diagnoses and medications, would that shorten the time for doctor completion of reports? Our research says that it does. Does messaging influence the performance of doctors in their report completion? Having medical requests built into practice management software means that we can push messages to providers effortlessly.
It is through such enquiry and collaboration that valuable progress can be made. You don’t need the answers to commence an innovation programme, but you do need the mindset and means to obtain those answers and to use them to do better by your stakeholders.
Interested in finding out more about Konnect NET? You can contact us at info@konnectnet.com.au