Healthcare is not about an insurance claim, a lab result or a medication. We think it is though because that is the healthcare we read about in the news and experience in our pocketbooks. We criticize healthcare when it doesn’t work for us and applaud it when it saves our bacon. But healthcare is just the result of individual decisions we’ve made, actions we’ve taken and accidents and genetic makeups that we can’t avoid. We can’t expect to save healthcare by trying to restructure the result. We have to impact the formula.
If we wait for the insurance claim or the lab results or the prescription medication to give us a signal of the health of an individual that needs care services for prevention then we are, by definition, too late. What if there is no medical claim and this individual either chooses not to access healthcare services, delays care, or is not well informed about his/her options? The better we can understand what is happening in the life of an individual the better able we are to reach out, build a relationship around prevention, and avoid high cost healthcare.
We built Tandem , a technology that helps health plans and employers align the right health actions to the right individuals, to motivate people to take preventive actions in order to improve their health and reduce the cost of healthcare on their pocketbooks. By delivering focused, targeted offers that are specifically designed to indicate the next most appropriate health action, individuals can act with a well informed and clear purpose.
The LexisNexis® Socieoeconomic Health Score is an integral part of Tandem because it helps our customers better tailor the right health actions to the right people. Medical history is often not available or is insufficient to trigger the right health actions. However we know that an individual’s socioeconomic environment has high correlations with depression, substance abuse, hospital readmissions and medication adherence to name a few. In a world where our personal data seems to be used to influence us to do things that aren’t that healthy the work we do with LexisNexis Health Care is different.
Today we are using the LexisNexis Socioeconomic Health Score to help provide individuals with personalized roadmaps of health that can change healthcare from focusing on the results to focusing on the formula. We are helping our customers build better relationships and concentrating efforts on the people that will benefit most from a service or an intervention. Together we are redefining healthcare, not for the institutions that consume 20% of our GDP but for the individuals who are making smarter decisions to live their healthiest life.
Russell Benaroya is Co-Founder and CEO of EveryMove, a pioneer in consumer engagement. Through their product, Tandem, they work with health plans and self-funded employers to drive specific health actions among specific members to meet specific near term business goals. He may be reached at Russell@EveryMove.com.