CHARLESTON, SC – A well-known provider of IT solutions for the healthcare benefits market is betting that a message can be delivered much more effectively with pictures, rather than text.
Benefitfocus, based in Charleston, S.C., has launched Video-as-a-Service (VaaS), an end-to-end solution that offers video production, post-production services, delivery, hosting and online distribution of content.
“Video in general is such a powerful tool,” says Nina Sossamon-Pogue, vice president of Benefitfocus Media. “We create the videos and we host them as well.”
An Emmy-winning former television news anchorwoman, Sossamon-Pogue oversees a 12-employee department that works out of a specially built studio in Charleston. The department’s most recent customers are Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, which is producing e-billing videos and quarterly videos from the organization’s CEO, and the Maryland-based Bon Secours Health System, which is working on cultural training videos for its employees and safety training videos for staffing agencies.
“We are integrating this new communication tool into our electronic enrollment, billing and wellness initiatives,” said Roger Foreman, BCBSKC’s executive vice president of sale and chief marketing officer. “It is extremely simple – Benefitfocus Media does all the creation, hosting and delivery of the content we need for our customers.”
The value of video has caught the attention of many a healthcare analyst. Both Datamonitor and Gartner have noted Benefitfocus’ product, which was included in Gartner’s June report “Hype Cycle for Healthcare Payers, 2008.”
Shawn Jenkins, Benefitfocus’ president and CEO, said VaaS fits neatly into the company’s benefits management 2.0 goals. “Combining our new VaaS offering with our well-established Software as a Solution platform we are rapidly changing the healthcare ecosystem,” he said. “These innovations are allowing carriers and employers to control cost, enhance healthcare and maintain a competitive edge.”
According to the research firm comScore, Inc., 11 billion videos were viewed online in April 2008, a 50 percent jump in one year. The number fueled Benefitfocus’ first video venture, icyou, an online repository of healthcare-related videos launched last year. The company started with roughly 200 videos last September and now has thousands in its library.
“We really didn’t want to re-invent the wheel,” says Sossamon-Pogue. “We wanted to be the online source for anyone looking for a (health care video). We’re the aggregators.”
As for producing videos, Sossamon-Pogue says physicians and other healthcare providers have information that could be related to the public in much better ways than words on a piece of paper or computer screen. And in this day of consumer-oriented healthcare, it’s important to give the consumer easy access to information, whether it be on a medical condition or a way to pay their healthcare bills.
“To see the doctor in a white coat just saying, ‘This is what you need to know about this,’ is so much better than reading words in a journal,” she said.