As more insurance companies adopt mobile strategies, Google's payer guru says health insurance as a whole has a lot of work to do following the modern mobile, internet-based consumer.
From the point of view of many consumers online, health reform has become synonymous with insurance reform, said Bill Lan, Google's head of industry and services. Some of Google insurance queries today "didn't even exist two years ago," Lan said, at a forum in Chicago held by America's Health Insurance Plans.
And about 30 percent of all Google queries related to health insurance are from users on mobile devices, Lan said. "If you don't have an engagement strategy around mobile, you're basically missing out on a third of that traffic," he said.
More than than being available through mobile apps, Lan said insurers should also take note of consumer fragmentation and friction.
Insurers vying for members in insurance exchanges, Medicaid or Medicare are joining the ranks of other industries, notably retail, in trying to use mobile health content and personalized outreach without being alienating, Lan said.
If they want to target certain demographics through mobile and other channels, insurers should think about how their messages can get across to the right people in a sea of information and media.
"If you advertise on CNN and a user watches yoga videos and then types in Type 2 diabetes," or a user "is drinking Red Bull and searching for 'ACA penalties,'" Land said, "those are two different types of conversations you want to have."
The notion of friction, and the ability to remove it for consumers through smoother processes, has been one of Google's long-running obsessions.
From an operational standpoint, gathering data on that friction and on engagement "touch points" and using them effectively is going to be a challenge for insurers and health organizations, as it is for other industries, but mobile and web consumer data is available to get started, Lan said.
"It's something that we have to think about from a technology standpoint, if you start to build a solution that really solves now, it's already too late."
Also at the America's Health Insurance Plans conference, writer and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation entrepreneur-in-residence Thomas Goetz echoed a similar argument, telling insurance and health professionals to not only measure the outcomes of their mobile efforts but to measure the experiences.
"Software has eaten the world," Goetz said. "It has gone through industry after industry and turned analog dollars into digital pennies by reducing costs," and now its going to consumers through their devices, enabling everything from personal health tracking to mobile claims management.
In healthcare, Google's Lan said, the convergence of mobile device and lots of consumer friction is leading organizations to focus increasingly more on the consumer experience. "The health law has just accelerated that," Lan said.