Consumers have tasted the digital healthcare platform experience, and they want more of it.
In an On the Agenda® panel discussion, PYMNTS’ Karen Webster welcomed Matt Renfro, co-founder and CEO at Lynx; Yusuf Qasim, president of payments at Zelis; and Faisal Sublaban, EVP of travel, hospitality and entertainment at Sharecare, to discuss growing consumer awareness of, and demand for, unified healthcare platforms.
Grounding the talk is a new study, “Healthcare In The Digital Age: Consumers See Unified Platforms As Key To Better Health,” a PYMNTS and Lynx collaboration, with key findings including the fact that 79% of consumers want to pay medical bills and access health information on a single digital platform.
“We believe the healthcare financial journey from care to payment is broken,” said Zelis’ Qasim. “I’ve been through that journey where sometimes I have a bill, but I know it’s not a bill, and when do I pay it? I don’t know where to go.”
Sharecare’s Faisal put a positive spin on it, saying, “the silver lining of the pandemic is that it did provide a lot of awareness of this digital health transformation. Essentially overnight we went from Blockbuster to Netflix, which is kind of the opportunity and why we’re all so excited.”
Webster cited study findings that consumers now want simplicity, seamlessness, and a one-stop experience when it comes to healthcare bills and info.
Lynx’s Renfro picked up on that point.
“You don’t necessarily have this embedded FinTech approach in healthcare that enables me to manage my healthcare spending account next to searching if my doctor is in-network next to when it’s appropriate to pay my medical bill,” he said. “It’s all disconnected vendors, white label systems, single sign-on, and that’s really what we’re equipped to fix.”
That’s a big move for a sector that’s been slow to modernize, but it has to begin somewhere.
Qasim said, “When you think about platforms or technologies that exist today, there’s either a lack of trust or the lack of trust is a result of a lack of data. It’s the infrastructure and the technology underneath that’s allowing us to connect and be able to share data and build trust.”
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Webster noted a key finding from the study that consumers are often unsure of coverages, costs and other crucial healthcare information, and now seek the convenience in that process, with benefits and payments data sitting side-by-side, made easy to understand and act on.
Sharecare’s Sublaban said the quest for simplicity figures prominently in his company’s roadmap: “How can we help the smartphone become a healing device,” he said, “and how do we do so in a manner in which it’s altogether better, with ‘altogether better’ meaning bringing the doctor, the employer and health plan to the palm of the member’s hand.”
Likening digital healthcare as consumers see it now to an Amazon-like experience, Renfro said, “You can start to reimagine a new introduction to a health plan. Maybe my member ID card is also this consolidated healthcare wallet that gets me 5% cash back on a Sharecare travel site or is my mechanism to get rewarded in real time for doing the right healthy behavior.”
The conversation veered into study findings again, noting that consumers want something like a healthcare super app to handle the entire patient journey. That resonated with panelists.
Sublaban said this is a core concept behind its Sharecare Plus offering, which brings together “benefits navigation, clinical engagement, access into our digital therapeutics ecosystem, virtual care and chronic disease management.” The longitudinal data generated by patients using the system helps create better outcomes and more satisfied stakeholders on all sides, he said.
On the payments front, Qasim said it’s still a painful and disjointed process, but added that “there’s so much technology, with what Faisal and the Sharecare team are doing, what Matt and Lynx are doing, as well as what Zelis is doing, we’re adding a lot more value in a much more simplistic way that all stem from technology.”
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Renfro summed up the challenges this way: “There’s no Plaid of healthcare payments, for the most part. HSA, FSA, largely the administrators are not built off banking infrastructure. Why I get excited about what Yusuf is talking about in the relationships they have with both payers and providers is that those rails can be used for consumers and providers who are struggling.”
In a unified platform approach, data resides together with medical payments and care information informing each other, creating the potential for that healthcare digital wallet that can also accrue incentives, clarify patient payments responsibility, find specialists and more.
“That’s kind of the approach we’re taking is how can we complement such a massive provider payment network like this on the issuing side? I would love to be a part of solving that,” Renfro said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”
Doing so requires scale and a lot of moving parts to work harmoniously.
In the age of the gig economy and with massive changes in employment due to macroeconomic conditions, Sublaban noted, “If you don’t provide that end-to-end experience that includes literacy, advocacy, the payments Yusef and Matt are talking about, and the data and insights accordingly, you will be at a disadvantage.”
Qasim talked up the role of acquisitions and partnerships in building this kind of connected healthcare ecosystem, saying, “I think selective partners with the right model, with the right mindset, they’re going to have better outcomes. I think we’ll continue to see, and we’re seeing a lot of activity there. You have to be more selective.”
Renfro acknowledged these complexities while positing that “the days of the direct-to-consumer healthcare companies playing an acquisition marketing game with poor unit economics, that’s not going to happen in the future. Companies have to be focused on how they are truly adding value in the system.”