Aaron Conant 0:18

Hey everybody, Happy Wednesday. And my name is Aaron Conant. I'm the Co-founder and Managing Director of BWG Connect. We're a networking and knowledge sharing group, but 1000s of organizations who do exactly that, we network and now share together to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it is that shaping the digital landscape as a whole, I talk with 30 to 40 organizations every week to stay on top of those trends. And when the same topic comes up over and over again, we host an event like this. So it's completely interactive, educational informational, at any point in time that you have a question, just hit star five hand will go up on the screen here, we can bring you in and have you ask it, we want to get as many answers as possible, we're also going to jump around to people just you know, to get them involved in and have a great conversation. In the The other thing, as I was kind of noting these had a couple more people join, we're starting, you know, three to four minutes after the hour, and we're going to wrap up with three to four minutes to go as well. Just so you know, if you're looking at your watch, we're gonna get you out of here and time to get on to the next meeting. And maybe, you know, grab a cup of coffee along the way. So we've, you know, plenty time to do that. So I want to kind of kick it off here. You know, talk with a lot of different organizations as a whole. In this school, we came up with this, you know, the topic for this role of Remote Patient Management in your digital health system as a whole, the, the crazy, you know, thing that's happened, you know, a lot of people think of digital straight from a direct to consumer side, you know, there's a lot of people concerned about Amazon and b2b and what's happening here and there. But in the digital health space, it's been affected, I would say even more because of the fact we're here, you know, it's been accelerated because of COVID which was directly in the healthcare space as a whole. And so just some leaders in the space that have been great friends, partners, supporters of the network, we invite you that to kind of give us a heads up of what they're doing what they're seeing in the space, they're working with a lot of different organizations as a whole from Wellframe, so called people Susan Beaton, right so super collaborative, you know, healthcare industry executive, yet a super big passion for engaging consumers, you know, outside of those traditional four walls of healthcare, you know, 25 years of experience as a clinical nurse leader, health plan executive, you know, coming welfare from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska, so maybe some of you on the line have interacted with her before, you know, she's VP of Care Management there. And so just you know, tons of experience here in clinic or clinical ampair arenas as a whole but also have Rachel Daricek. She's a senior director, Product Marketing at Wellframe. So really interesting background, I love it. So my background is chemistry and biochemistry. She's got a background BS in chemical engineering, masters of engineering management, you know, MBA from Kellogg School of Management. She's had VP marketing roles at TetraScience books, research a bunch of different places, but all around great, you know, resource for us as a network for picking their brain 20 years of experience, you know, across the marketing strategy, so super excited. And there's kind of some things that we want to cover, you know, as a whole, you know, how the pandemic shaped the way patients expect to receive care and support roadmaps right and ideas around delivering personalized, integrated customer experience. These are things we want to kind of get to today. And then some other things, you know, what technologies bcsp, BCBS plans are prioritizing to meet those expectations. So, we're trying to get to as much as we can, and maybe a couple other things, if we have time. I'm going to go ahead and kind of kick it over, you know, to, you know, Rachel and Susan, you know, Rachel, if you want to give us united mind, you take in a couple minutes and just, you know, give us a little, a little bit of background of Wellframe where you guys fit in the health system. I know you you guys are you're helping a lot of different organizations out. But we'd love to hear your thoughts there. And then we can kind of jump into the discussion as a whole.

Rachel Daricek 4:15

Yeah, Aaron sounds great. Thank you for that. Very nice introduction, I'm going to have to have us training my husband better.

Aaron Conant 4:23

But I've been trained well with my wife.

Rachel Daricek 4:27

So so, you know, the pandemic really reshaping customer consumer, in this case, member expectations around how healthcare is delivered. That's really where Wellframe fits into this incredibly complicated health ecosystem that we've all chosen to spend our time in. I mean, we've all been in this industry, a long technique. We've been talking about virtual health and telehealth for 10, 15 years now, but you Know the mandate, I mean, we had no other option for the most part for the last 18, 18 months, then to go digital go through all use telehealth, if we wanted to continue with any kind of proactive preventive care, you know, if something went wrong, and you had to go in person it was it was really a hassle. You know, this, this whole conversation is really heated up. And when one parallel that really strikes me in all my years of experience is that every time a new channel that pops up, everyone thinks that the first instinct is that I'm just going to use this channel, and just by using this channel, it's going to have an impact. But we know now that just by having, for example, a website, just by doing email to give parallel to the marketing world, just having it or just doing it doesn't get you the impact or the outcomes that you want. It just means that it's something that you have, we've all gotten those terrible emails, and then we're like, oh, why do I get so much email, but when you get a good email, you really value it. And this is where I think we are in terms of a healthcare ecosystem. When we think about the adoption of virtual and telehealth, we're now at this place where if it's been adopted, we've we've passed that tipping point, the quite the next question is going to be do organizations use it? Well? Is it optimized? Is it efficient? Is it used in the right use cases, do members have a good experience when when they use it. And so it's been really amazing to watch this rapid adoption, and I'm excited for this next phase. So no matter which way you think about telehealth, it's still the episodic and transactional bucket that we think about when we think about in person provider visits, you still have to make an appointment and still have to show up on time, it's not the kind of you can't really do it asynchronously. So we are figuring out the best case, the best ways to use it. But there's still that gap and that opportunity, how do we provide virtual support to members so that we can holistically support them in between the clinical encounters, whether it's virtual using telehealth or other channels, or whether it's in person. And that's where Wellframe fits into the healthcare ecosystem, we actually partner with one in three Blue Cross Blue Shield plans already. And what we help them do is reimagine their, their relationships with members through an approach that we call digital health management. There's this incredible pressure pressure to evolve to digitally transform. And it's hard, it is not easy. But but that's where we come in, we have a bunch of digital health management solutions, we can work care management, advocacy, navigate navigation, and we partner closely with our customers, of which blues plans are a large portion to to help them digitally transform and tech enable these internal processes to be able to virtually support members in between clinical encounters, which is 99.9% of their lives. So yeah, we're excited to be here today and tackle some of these topics together.

Aaron Conant 8:14

Awesome. Love it. And just a reminder, anybody if you have questions along the way, you want to jump in, just hit star five, a handle up on the screen here, and we'll just we'll just bring you into the conversation as a whole. But Susan it's over to you just, you know, we've chatted before on this, you know, how have you seen the pandemic change the course of how members are expecting to receive the care and support? And I know, Rachel, you know, hit on it a little bit and just triggered this question about it, you know, like, how have you seen the pandemic change? You know, the course, love to hear it?

Susan Beaton 8:47

Yeah, Rachel explained it really well. So, you know, for the last 18 months, now, they've gotten used to it, it's an expectation now not a nice to have, and they're expecting to be able to have engagement virtually. And they might have to go back intermittently to the way they were engaging with the healthcare system before. But they really now the virtual health as kind of like a, an added distance, relationship, right, and interaction with their healthcare providers, with their pharmacies, and now their health plan, and what they're wanting and what health plans occurred during that pandemic, and what members are expecting from them is almost in the relationship of peace of mind, daily assurance of Benefits and Coverage. So if you think about at one time, you know, most of the nation at some point the last 18 months was experiencing the same thing, whether it's through themselves or a loved one or friend that has, you know, gotten and been affected by COVID is now it's like, what are my benefits and how do I know where to go? Who's Going to cover the test or, you know, when am I going to get the vaccine? And how is that covered, all of those things come back to not only a physician relationship kind of health plan relationship to put out there that peace of mind, and provide improved support and education, and insights and feedback from members. And so that tasks to be done remotely. Now, the last 18 months, has proven that health plans can do that, right? They pivoted very quickly, and they were able to build those virtual relationships with their members. So the crisis itself accelerated the need to deploy virtual Health Solutions. And to Rachel's point, it's not just telehealth anymore. And then now we've seen consumers adopted at a scale that we haven't seen before. And now it's up to the health hands, it's how are we going to do that more efficiently moving forward? It just can't be turned off now consumers are going to demand that they're expecting it. So I think that's going to be the greatest continued need for members is that digital interaction and availability of health plan staff and their benefits? I pass it over.

Anne 11:10

Sorry, this is Ann at Capital Blue Cost. So you guys, I'm sorry, if I'm backtracking. But so this meetings just talking about everyone doing telehealth in general? Are there vendors that supply to the health plans? And it's for FTP members to or just the outside of FTP? Just curious.

Aaron Conant 11:33

So this call is a whole? digital if not just yet. Yeah, it's digital. It's telehealth. It's, it's everything across the board. And, and so for this particular call, we brought on like, Wellframe because they're great friends, they're, they're kind of Resident experts, but we don't bring in sales pitches or anything like that. But it's nice for them to dress through. But we've also kind of isolated this to, you know, BSB VCs, just for, you know, I don't know, open dialogue as a whole. So anyways, just a quick note there. But you're open to ask whatever questions you would like is as we go, and I'm going to try and you know, unmute people as or if we've muted you, then just hit star five, and we can bring you into the conversation. Really?

Anne 12:23

Yeah, it's not SCP per se, it's really for just the health of health plans, because we do we help take care of SCP members to federal employee program members. So I didn't know that was part of this conversation towards it just regular, you know?

Susan Beaton 12:40

No, that's a that's a great question. So this is Susan, it really is for all members for all lines of business, including your FET members.

Anne 12:50

And in this is just, open dialogue about how you know, we're all doing this. I know, my plan is I don't know the details, because I'm not really involved in it. But just wondering, so you, are there vendors you guys work with to? Or you just, you know, you're always at your plans or providing your own resources for these telehealth? If I know we are.

Susan Beaton 13:14

Yeah. And that's a great question, too. And that we can, can I ask for the audience as well, from the other Blue plans. And I think that's where our conversation today, we're really bringing in about, you know, those digital assets, and remote patient monitoring, and all of those things that as plans that the blue is that you're offering to your members to engage, and really just have a conversation about how we're doing that, how we're engaging members of the health plans, and surfacing those digital tools and assets to them so they can engage real time with your nurses with your customer service staff. If you're okay, yeah,

Anne 13:54

I yeah, I just, I was just curious that, you know, because I don't have too much of the information that now I know we are doing it, I just don't know, you know, the details, that's all.

Aaron Conant 14:06

No. And that's which is great as this is completely educational, informational. You know, this is the web can act as a networking and knowledge sharing group. So in this case, if you don't know and you just want to sit back and learn 100%. And as questions come up, just hit star five again. And we can unmute you and bring you in it'll, it'll be great. And that goes for anybody who you have questions along the way what's going on. boarding? And he has a question. Absolutely. Thanks for jumping in. Now, I'm going to jump out just Emily you hit the star you hit star five, I can go ahead and unmute you I don't know if you had a question or comment but if you want to jump in, feel free.

Emily 14:48

I was just curious when you guys are talking about virtual health and consumers adopting in scale fashion I've never seen before. Are we looking at more like for emergency like one off visits or is it It's more for like they're looking for for primary care and like all the interactions that they're expecting to have along their care journey.

Rachel Daricek 15:06

Yeah, Rachel, do you believe her? Yeah. This is Rachel, I can come in on that one. And I think we're seeing it across the board. There's that triage aspect, when there's something urgent that happens. And as a human, you doesn't know anything about know very little about the clinical part of healthcare, you know, something happens, and you're you just don't know what to do. So, normally, folks with commercial healthcare, insurance, if something goes wrong, you call your doctor, if it's really bad, maybe you go straight to Urgent Care straight to the emergency room. During COVID. Obviously, that was a lot scarier. So depending on the severity, people would turn to digital or virtual first. But with that, there was also the shift to anything that didn't require in person in order to keep going at all had to be virtual. So that that kind of forced adoption for you know, your regular annual visits, or any specialists do anything that you needed to take care of on a regular basis. The option was, the other option was just to not do it at all, which for some people is not an option. And for the rest of us, we probably shouldn't have put things off as long as we say, I do think that it's across the board in lots of different use cases, whether it's any kind of in an urgent setting, whether it's your regular preventive care, whether it's any kind of specialty care. There's some things like dentists that you can't do virtually. Mental health, behavioral health was a huge, huge, huge transition to, to virtual and telehealth. And one piece of that that we haven't mentioned yet, but that is also really important when you think about virtual care is RPM remote patient monitoring and the ability to track biometrics. And you see all of these companies that are that are now talking about, you can have your annual physical from home, they literally ship you a kit with everything that you need to take your own blood pressure, and your your own heart. They all the other things that the nurse does your own weight. And you just feed that into the system before you get on with with your PCP. And it's pretty amazing the things that you can do the shift to people convalesce in real transitions of care if they have been in the emergency room, let's get them home sooner having a few nights in the hospital as possible, because that's where the biggest risk of contracting COVID is, and the ability to shift to the hospital at home. I think there's a lot of really fascinating use cases out there that people are a lot more open to adopting now that we're comfortable with it.

Aaron Conant 17:57

Awesome, and quick reminder others if you have questions or topics you want to talk about just hit star five on the end of open the screen, and we can it will bring the conversation right do you know so? You know, it certainly has going through my mind was you know that I think Rachel or Susan, you were mentioning earlier, you know about the change in behavior as a whole, you know, you would traditionally had especially when Hey, what is what is my coverage? What does it look like? Is that changed that there's, you know, a group of people that never really considered that rarely get sick, rarely went to, you know, the hospital and now we've got this, you know, a virus that's changing, everything is highly contagious, you may have been hostile when they're checking these things. But then that splits to health plans as a whole. Right. And just thinking of, you know, the audience today, what kind of, you know, I'll kick this over to you, Rachel, what kind of supportive you've seen health plans, you know, change to provide members, you know, during this time, right, or, you know, and are, you know, how have you seen them change their digital health strategy? Because that's, you know, that's really what we're talking about here as a whole is, it seems like, hey, this was a nice to have before and you know, but now it's table stakes.

Rachel Daricek 19:11

Yes, I completely agree. I think one of the silver linings and the things that I was most excited to see, in terms of adapting during, during the pandemic, from health plans was just this ability to push everything else aside and focus on what was needed. So you know, everyone, health plans, large healthcare organizations, for years, we've all been talking about digital transformation, and all of these things that we now have the technology to do, but we need to put in the people and the processes and the incentives internally to be able to do it. You know, with COVID, we really had no other choice. So it was really exciting to me to kind of see these large, historic organizations that have been around forever can start thinking More like startups, you know, my my backgrounds on the health tech world, and putting putting that hat on and being more agile and really saying, you know, let's let's put some of our things that we thought were requirements and processes to the side and focus on what we need to do to sustain our business and to support our members. So some examples that I'm thinking of are, you know, being a lot more agile around conversations and the types of content I mean, think about how rapidly the COVID situation evolved. And we learned, what is it? How do we deal with it? How is it? How is it transmitted from one person to another, and then that reveals more topics like social isolation, anxiety, depression, which I think we hopefully, I hope no one felt it. But, you know, it's pretty likely that most everyone felt some version of that, or the last 18 months. And the way health plans were able to rapidly create and deploy and support members and in providing this type of content. And then in just approaching the the channels that were used to engage with members, by the time you create and get approved and printed and send out a mailer, everything's changed. So you have to go first of all, you have to go digital in order to do things quickly enough for it to still be relevant. So I think there were a lot of changes and attitudes. And really, we were able to prove to ourselves that that digital can be done at scale. within health plans.

Aaron Conant 21:30

Yeah. Awesome. Love it. Now I'm going to, you know, adjust to your mentioning content as well. And I'll kind of keep this one over to Susan. And just a reminder, you know, if you have questions, you want to jump in, just hit star five, and then I want to jump out to some people that, you know, so Susan, you know, considering the audience, like from your prior experience, you know, how should you know, BCBS plans, be preparing for delivering, you know, a more personalized, integrated, you know, member experience, right, we're talking, you know, content here. Right, but also, you know, making them feel like a member. We're talking winning, retaining business, you know, most nationals as a whole, we'd love to hear your thoughts there.

Susan Beaton 22:13

Yeah, I think you know, Rachel has talked about the, the unprecedented speed and scope of the pandemic. And really How is 14 health plans to address many unexpected and political challenges at the same time. And as quickly as those issues emerged, really, the blues as a health plan, really, any executives and this team has found ways to address all the issues that came up for their members. So when you think about reassessing benefits for co pays and telehealth and getting the content and information about COVID, and where to go and how to get tested. And then also addressing all the things their members were facing at home, as Rachel mentioned, is about you know, anxiety, depression, loss of jobs. So those experiences in a very short time, really then help the health plan set up for even delivering in the future a more personalized and integrated member experience, we saw that health plans can be very nimble. And I will talk about being an alga, which most of the blues are as taking like, you know, the situation that happens with the pandemic, and then really fast moving through that, to support their members. And so even though, you know, maybe digital health, or remote patient monitoring might have been on their roadmap for the next one year or three year, and setting out in their strategies to increase their interactions at scale and support members, virtually, they had to come up with really innovative ways to deliver that even quicker. And so they were able to pivot, and not just do you know, business as usual. And really, you know, pick up the pace and delivering the things that the members needed and meeting them where they are, which was in their home that at that point. And I think this is where the blues really have that advantage when you think about, you know, winning and retaining business, unlike the Nationals that we're working with their employer groups and brokers and bringing in those market perspective, which they're asking them to address was the blues already are seen as a market leader and their core services, they already have the network breath, and a discount and value based care, we saw that come to benefit right for their health plan members was that they were able to get their telehealth services or their value based care providers, the primary care physicians that they trusted, and be able to them, you know, relay that to all of their members. And so all of that along with that brand recognition, that's some comfort to those health plan members during the epidemic. So I think in order to keep doing that, what we're seeing is near the blue build really well or already on containing costs and helping members navigate to the networks that they need to do, and see and go to. And so now that just becomes how do you help them continue to navigate in the future. And that's where the, you know, through remote patient monitoring and telehealth and digital solutions, they're able to continue to help them navigate to the highest quality, lowest cost providers and offer customized, you know, offerings and tools and engagement strategies to their employer groups and their employees. So I think there's a huge advantage already that the blues bring to their membership base. And as seen as a health plan that actually engages in Harris for their health plan members. And now this is just another way through visual that they're able to differentiate themselves and really continue to showcase all the strengths that they have, and make sure all their members know about it and have access to it, and which they've been able to do and improve it in the last 18 months. Now awesome.

Aaron Conant 26:06

Yeah, I love it. And I want to jump. I want to get tackle something you said around remote monitoring and in jump around to some people, but also have a handout and just reminder to others. If you have a question or a comment, hit star five I handle come up and we can unmute you. But I'm going to jump out there. If you want to jump in brief intro on yourself, the organization with the awesome and then yeah, I feel we feel free to comment or ask away. I just couldn't meet you. And then Yeah, that would be great.

Speaker 3 26:34

Yeah, thanks. Hello, everyone. I’m head of digital transformation for acsb. Good question. This is around digital strategy, right? How do we how do you force the from Oh, well, same perspective, right? How do you force the provider and health plan digital strategies kind of converging, knowing that telehealth, right is is on a comma commoditization curve already? So what kind of strategy convergence Do you foresee, right with respect to providers pushing their digital agenda, as well as peers kind of pushing their digital digital agenda?

Rachel Daricek 27:16

Yeah, Susan, I can take this one if you'd like? Sure. I'd like to say that as well. But I think this is a really interesting question rename, when I've been thinking about it. The best case scenario, and the hurdle that we all have to overcome is this interoperability conundrum and being able to share person level human level data across all the key stakeholders, whether it's providers, whether it's health systems, whether it's health plans, whether it's having the data yourself, being able to share it with your caregivers, if you need to. I mean, I think that's the biggest hurdle. And I'm excited to see a lot of the regulation and progress that'll that'll happen over the next one to three years. However, that's less strategic, that's more just something that that needs to happen. But when I think about each of those key stakeholders, role in the larger healthcare ecosystem, you know, the providers are really, even for someone who goes to visit their doctor every month, that's still episodic, you're still only seeing your doctor once a month. And when you think about what the doctor the clinician is doing their day to day, they're, they're thinking about that one patient, then they're thinking about that next patient, and they're thinking about that next patient. They don't really have that time to take a step back and think about population health or specific segments of people. They're treating that one person at that one moment in time, and often the data that they have access to is also apathetic. It's what was that measurement I took six months ago or last month last time I saw them. health plans on the other side, on the other hand, have access to a lot more continuous data. And through through departments like care management, Member Services, navigation, concierge, bye, bye, cheque enabling and digitally transforming those departments get the opportunity to really connect with members almost daily if you want to. I mean, if you're asking someone to collect their blood sugar readings and upload it to to an app like Wellframe that's gonna happen daily, maybe multiple times a day. So and health plans, I mean, always are very good at analyzing population health and understanding how the risks and the likelihood the predictive nature of of different things and how that's going to impact large groups of people. So I think strategically every each one of the stakeholders has has a key role to play in helping people be healthier and more productive. And take control of their own health. And that's another piece of it right when when people have access to more of their data, when you're when you're taking your metrics every day and looking at a graph every day, you naturally just become more interested in what's going on and take more ownership of it. So I think that interoperability, the ability to share data is kind of the foundation. And then each of the key stakeholders is kind of uniquely is uniquely qualified to play a really big role in contributing to the overall healthcare, improved health care for individuals, population as a whole.

Aaron Conant 30:38

Nice. Anything else you study? Any other questions or follow ups?

Speaker 3 30:42

No, I thank you, I think interop is is going to be a critical foundational piece by to open a lot of different data access pathways. And, yeah, I think the population health versus the episode eight point of care health, I think, I think, I think I think they both will coexist, right. And they both serve different purposes, from a members perspective, with respect to care, navigation, versus point of care, accessibility. So thank you for confirming those perspectives.

Rachel Daricek 31:18

Yeah, and specific to heath plans and you can imagine any provider that you have a direct relationship with, if you're collecting this regular information, feed that over to them imagine how much more insight the physicians would have, when they're at that, doing that episodic treatment, and to be able to see that trend over time, there's a lot more informative than just do data, does, I think it's really incredible opportunity.

Aaron Conant 31:45

Another hand up here. Let's go ahead and jump back out to know, just unmuted, if you want to jump in. We can keep jumping around here a little bit. Just reminder, if you have a question, hit star five, and we can bring you into the conversation for sure. It's been fantastic so far, you know, if we, if we can just take a look at you know, what kind of innovations are resonating? Right. I mean, we've had some, some some great conversations so far. But I mean, maybe I kick this over to Rachel, and then love to have students off as well. But what kind of product innovations are resonating with plans to march towards a more, you know, personalize, you know, we keep talking about member experience, though, personalized, will say integrated member experience. Now, what kind of practices innovations are resonating with plans, I'll kick that over to you, Rachel, maybe there's some trends out there something.

Rachel Daricek 32:42

So many trends, and it's, you know, as the rest of the tech world comes up with more and more ways to enable us, it's really fascinating to see how different industries use those, those tools and technologies. And we touched on a lot of them here today, you know, this whole concept of the members 360. So we've all had that experience, where you call in, and you give your your name and your address, or whatever your information is, and then you get transferred over to somewhere else. And they ask you the same questions all over again. You know, there are now so many tools out there that can take care of that. So everyone on the plant side, can have access to the same information and don't have to, can personalize the customer experience just by getting on the phone and knowing already or if it's not telephonic, if it's online, or through an app, maybe that information is even pre populated. And all Someone has to do is validate that's there. And those are they seem like little things. I mean, they're huge internal projects, for any large organization. But on the customer experience side, they go a really, really long way. And then it enables you to do all kinds of other things. You've started building trust, you've provided a good experience. You know, NDA is next step actions are a big buzzword that we hear all the time, how can we use all of the data that we've aggregated and put it in this central cloud location and harmonize and clean what we do? Is this data? Well, one really important thing we can do is, whether it's its staff, or through mailers, or through apps, you know, whatever channels that we're using to engage with members, how can we help them know what the next thing is? They said do to take care of their their health or to take advantage of the benefits that they have available to them? close those gaps if they haven't been to a when I can't keep track of when my next PCP appointment is, is that every two years is that every three years I have no idea. So to have someone send me that little nudge and say, Hey, you have a PC, you need to do your regular PCP appointment, make that do that now. Just super, super helpful and By using a lot of the tools that we have available to us in interesting ways we can support members. And in doing that, we already talked about the RPM trends. But that is a big one, I think there's a huge opportunity and extending that from just the, you know, typically, when we talk about this with customers, or internally, the first use case that comes up is providers or hospitals. But as we've been talking about, I think chronic conditions and the ability to help people manage their day to day is a big opportunity for health plans. And a lot of people are talking about that. There are things like, you know, med reconciliation, think about entailing as an intake assessment, especially for care management, instead of 90 minutes on the phone, answering all of these questions where everyone at work, or your family member can hear them. I mean, imagine if you could just answer those questions in 15 minutes in the privacy of your phone. And it because we can read a lot faster than we can listen and then respond. So you know, as we were talking about with interoperability, like having that data, having that convenient channel to be able to engage with members regularly. Those are kind of the foundational requirements. But what we once we have those two things in place, we have so much opportunity to do a lot with it.

Aaron Conant 36:24

Awesome. I love it. And I want to jump out to Laurie, Laurie, if you want to jump in. I just started using if you want to unmute on your side as well. Laurie, if you want to jump in brief intro on yourself in the organization, the awesome and then yeah, comment, ask away. Thanks for hitting star five.

Laurie 36:42

Can you hear me? Yeah, loud and clear. Okay, great. Thank you for allowing me to ask the question Laurie here with DVP for care management here. And we launched with Wellframe last year and doing doing pretty good and trying to come up on our success, one of the things we're working on right now. And so I'm interested in the rest of the group's take on digital engagement. And we need to collect race, ethnicity, language data in a better way. So I'm wondering what the thoughts are either from welfare from a roadmap perspective, or what other plans are doing around, you know, that type of population, and remote monitoring, and digital engagement of those populations. Any anything insightful that anyone's doing? I'd love to hear it.

Aaron Conant 37:33

And I'll kick it over like Susan or Rachel first, and then we can see other hands as they as they pop up as well. But, Susan, you are Rachel, you want to jump in there?

Rachel Daricek 37:43

Yeah, either way. I feel like I'm doing I actually want to hear what everyone else has to say on this.

Aaron Conant 37:50

Yeah, jump in. Susan. That would be awesome.

Susan Beaton 37:52

Yeah, no, I just only caught part of the question. If you could repeat that question for me, Aaron. Yeah, you want to ask?

Laurie 37:59

Yes. No, that's great. I'm just wondering, well, for him has any kind of a roadmap around health equity initiatives? I guess I would state it that way. How's that?

Susan Beaton 38:10

Yep. I would say most definitely. Yes. I think that is something that we're hearing from all the health plan and from our customers, as well as you're hearing from your members, as well. So I think we think about health equity, whether it could be services, whether it could be the communication, whether it can be access to care, whether it's social determinants of health, that affect those health equity is all of the pieces. When we think about how do we communicate that to the member? How do we gather that information from the member bring those insights back to the health plan as well, that they're making the appropriate outreaches and engagement. And you have to be able to surface that in a lot of different ways. And so whether it's through through that digital communication, in either sharing the assets that you have from your plan, or the resources, or community resources are directed into the right places of care and service that meet those health equity needs. So when you think about and Rachel mentioned this as a whole the whole time, we have a lot of information about our population. But there's certain things that we're also missing. And it goes beyond just maybe zip codes or where they get their services or lack of access of care. All of that can be gained by some of the insights and the communications and chat that goes on between the member and the nurse or the advocate that can also be brought back into the Health News surface that information. They can make meaningful engagement and outreach of and also address those health inequities as well. And rather than redesigning some of the benefits, so it depends also on your population or line of business and whether it's Medicaid or looking at employer groups that might have, you know, certain employees in certain areas that might have have the resources that they need is then how do you bring that back end, get those insights, basically have conversations about benefits and the need. And then also then making sure the members have the information that they need as well to make those decisions supported by your health plan.

Aaron Conant 40:16

Awesome. Love it and Laurie that that answer your question. And others, if you want to jump in with questions, hit star five, and we can keep waiting, keep the conversation going. It's awesome.

Rachel Daricek 40:27

Some of the other things that we think about, specifically when we think about health equity for all of our educational health content is, is optimized for health literacy as much as we can, recognizing that health is scary. And the average person really doesn't know much about health, like the clinical side of health and the words that physicians use, or really how to navigate their health plan. And so all of our content is written at a fourth grade level. There's lots of definitions and ways to better understand what important terms that you need to know. I mean, I forget exactly what the designation is, but we have in terms of accessibility, where the wireframe education and app overall is. Do you remember what it is, I can't remember exactly what the the number code is, but we're like, approved, accessible. And we The last thing, oh, native language, also is a bit though everything is translated into Spanish, I think it's also available in Haitian Creole, and then you know, we can add it to whatever other we can always translate into other languages as well. But that's, that's a big equity thing is being able to reach people in their native language. So we are always thinking about ways to making sure make sure that there are fewer, fewer and fewer barriers to folks to be able to actually use the welfare now.

Aaron Conant 41:56

Awesome, just a quick reminder, you have questions to start by or just comments, hit star five, we can unmute you and bring you in, you know, a question that I want to kick over decision that comes up, you know, over and over again, or as interviewer trying to figure out, what's the next step? Right, what's what do I do next? What have you seen, you know, hold back plans, you know, or, you know, plans, you know, holding back from giving members, you know, even employers, what they what they want, right? What's holding them back from doing things? Is it not the right staffing? Is it that the right pack is is not understanding, you know, the patient or the experience that they that they're expecting? So what are you seen really hold plants back from giving members and employers what they want, I guess, is the best way to just lay it out there.

Susan Beaton 42:47

I think, actually, I think plans do want to give their members right, and employers, all the things that they want that that's why they're there. But they're, they've already been doing what we would think about and what you know, I during seeing being there, so for 20 plus years, they're already doing what I call really hard work. So we think about before everything that they offer to the members or employee groups and what they surface to them, whether it through benefits, or network, or RPM, and digital engagement is behind the scenes, all the things they deal with state and federal regulations and Department of Insurance and bringing all of those things to life in order to pay a claim and addressing the benefits the employer groups want for their employees. And at the same time, you know, those of course services to a health plan, that the same time they're trying to implement, you know, new modern tools to engage them with, and to really move their, their view from the members side as a health plan that, you know, innovative and engaging and easy to do business with. And that takes a lot because the demands now from consumers and employer groups are changing. And so when you think about a lot of what health plans do today, is they have a lot of policies and procedures. And so now they have to then take those policies and procedures and modernize them and make it in a way that's consumable to employer groups in their employees and make it easy to access. And so instead of calling with your Rachel addresses, members don't want to call a health plan, but they have to call a health plan because that's where all the information is. And so I think that the things now that health plans are challenged with is then how do we take everything that we know of all of our years of experience, make it consumable bite sized information now that the consumer and employee can understand it, and engage with it and then use it appropriately. And the challenge is to do that alongside of paying claims and taking phone calls if they're not software development companies, and so they need to be able to have the tools in order to reach Members, right to offer them and engage them. And I think that's where then maybe one of the things is that they really need to focus on now, alongside of all those other four principles is taking into, into their practice about market demand and market perspective. And we now see, you know, a lot of health plans have consumer engagements, right leaders and digital leaders and having departments focused on that and going out and having conversations with members and bringing member insights. So those are all the things that before potentially may have not been focused on outside of core. And so it's not really I think that it was holding them back. It was it's now the right time to step into that role, and really offer that as a core competency as well.

Aaron Conant 45:50

Awesome I love it. And, you know, there's only jump out here because I think there's so the hand was back down. Oh, yeah. So we've got, I would say, you know, four minutes left here. So I want to make sure that we had we had opportunities for like key takeaways or thoughts. And if anybody wants to have a last minute hand come up, and we can get the question answered. You know, so Rachel, I'll take it to you first, for you know, around any key trends that you see emerging from your current clients, you know, and how they're making sure members are aware of, you know, virtual health services and benefits. We'd love to hear your thoughts on that as we get to key takeaways. And then, you know, I'll kick it over to Susan, to wrap up the conversation.

Rachel Daricek 46:36

Sure, thank you. I mean, the biggest trend is, is just, this is all I why we're all here today. You know, it's that trend of going digital. There under how clients are underpaid. They're from employer groups, from members themselves, to be able to interact with the health plans, the same way that they interact with everything else in their lives, whether it's their friends and family, whether it's retail establishments, whether it's their bank, my husband, and I refinance our condo, we did the entire thing online, it was amazing. You can do a mortgage, you know, entirely online, the only time you talk to a person is when you actually sign the papers. So, you know, people have just come to expect it. It's, it's faster, it's more convenient. It's more pleasant. And I think, you know, we're now seeing that with, with health plans as well. So just like Susan was saying, how do we continue to provide customers are asking us that are leading their own strategic initiatives to to answer the question of how do we provide the same or maybe even better, enhanced services to our members that we already do today? But how do we do it in new and modern ways? And what partners do we need to make that happen? You know, as Susan just laid out, health plans have a great many skills and core competencies. Historically, traditionally, digital is not is not is a numeric competency. So what partners Can you can you work with to get better, faster at using digital? And this, this runs the gamut from awareness, engagement, and storage, you know, any use case that you would want to engage with the member on? How can you kind of reimagine that, that for digital and as we like to say, marketing, you know, use the right channel, for the right person with the right message at the right time. We're not the telephone is not bad, the telephone is very valuable. But it takes a lot of time. And people are, I mean, the number of texts I send a day, or email versus the number of phone calls I'll make is, the ratio has completely changed over time. And, you know, health plans are trying to figure out exactly how they do that as well. Yeah.

Aaron Conant 48:57

Awesome. Love it. And let's get over to you soon to kind of wrap us up here in the final, you know, a couple minutes. You know, why does all this matter? I guess is is the question at the end of the day? Why does it matter for health plans? And how does in itemize you can take a couple minutes and explain how Wellframe can help.

Susan Beaton 49:17

Yeah, I think you know, Rachel said it really well, is that, you know, houses are under pressure to modernize their customers digital experience. And consumers which helpline numbers are, are showing that they have a value with digital experience, because what they're also hoping from their hopes and partners is that they're able then to offer them, you know, an easier path to understanding their benefits. And they want to have a personalized experience. And so we believe that truly help them are still in the best position to advocate for their members as they navigate, you know, the health care system. But to Rachel's point we know it's not enough to simply offer a digital health experience to members. So I think that's why welcoming people to help is provided more meaningful connection to their member, the ways that members are expecting it. And so because most of the health outcomes that members are experiencing are determined by factors happening outside of clinical care outside of the health plan, even outside of the writers office, you know, we're we're able to provide that opportunity to have those insights into what's going on during those times that you're not communicating with them on a regular basis or in between those claims being submitted. So in the end, members still want a relevant and easy to understand resource from their health plan, and a way to get the answers that been, and I think that's where we can help them continue with the with the support that they offer today.

Aaron Conant 50:46

Well, thank you. You know, so much everybody who was able to jump in fantastic conversation. Thanks for all the you know, all the questions. It's, it makes for a great interactive session. Rachel, Susan, thanks for being such great friends, supporters, partners of the network as a whole, you know, anybody on the line today, if you haven't chatted with either of them before 100%. We're setting up some time there. They're helping a lot of Blues plans out in the space and they're just all around great people and digital leaders. So worth a follow up conversation for sure. And with that, we're going to go ahead and wrap it all up. hope everybody has a fantastic Wednesday. Everybody stay safe. Take care. I look forward to having you on a future event. Thanks again, Rachel. Thanks, Susan. Alrighty, thank you, everybody with you. Already. It was fun. All right with you.