Jay Sheehy Explains the Importance of Understanding the Consumer

Jay Sheehy, senior vice president of product innovation at EmblemHealth, explained that improving customer experience is important in engaging the individuals, which can only be done if the health plan thinks more like a consumer and less like a healthcare company. Research and analysis as well as figuring out what is most important to the consumer is critical in engaging patients with their care.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What is the biggest lesson you have learned about improving customer experience?

The simple lesson is, you really have to focus on the consumer. You can’t anticipate or think you know what they want or what’s important to them. You have to do your own homework. You have to do your research and analysis and understand that every consumer has their commonalities but every consumer sub-segment is still very different.

For healthcare, you have to look at 78% of the decisions in healthcare are made by women. They are often the individuals responsible for the care of the children and the adult parents. And, if you ask women about health, what they tell you that’s important to them is their spiritual wellbeing, their emotional wellbeing, their fitness, their healthcare, and their financial protection. So when they think about that, it is not just about the healthcare benefits the way a healthcare company would look at, it’s really far more holistically as to how they as a consumer look at it as the purchaser. So how do you really understand those needs, and really address those more effecevtilely, not just in how you engage and communicate, but how you develop solutions that drive sustainable value for them and not look at it in 1 just particular lens.

Our view is we really want to evolve here to be more of a health and financial wellbeing company. How do you get to people more proactively to get them engaged well before they’re at a doctor’s office or a hospital? When they do have an issue, our goal is just to provide the highest quality of care to optimize their health, get them back to the best level of health we possibly can do. But how do we get people far more engaged, sort of far more upstream in the process.