Healthcare Providers Challenged to Improve Digital Experience as Baby Boomers and Seniors Go Online

The image of a tech-averse older consumer not understanding or being interested in using digital tools to manage their healthcare is a relic of the pre-pandemic era.

The baby boomers and seniors aging into Medicare today have seen the light — it’s on their device screens.

As thousands of Americans age into Medicare daily, new research finds strong demand among this group for platforms that make managing aspects of their health plan benefits easier, ideally in one place, and not via a collection of portals from their various providers.

In a discussion exploring this topic for PYMNTS’ “Tough Questions” series, Lynx Co-founder and CEO Matt Renfro and Endear Health Co-founder and CEO Chris Boudreaux said the pandemic forced older folks to get familiar with digital fast. Now, they’re becoming avid users.

“Over the span of a few weeks, video conferencing tools and mobile devices became the only way people could interact with their families, and that forced a lot of adoption,” Boudreaux said. “Digital literacy amongst the older population has never been higher. These folks are no longer just using digital tools, but they’re asking for them. It’s a great time for innovation.”

Renfro agreed.

“The pandemic, to Chris’ point, has been a catalyst to accelerate,” he said. “It’s not just millennials or Gen Z who are ordering on DoorDash or getting something delivered via Prime. It’s people that are aging into Medicare. Consumer expectations have changed. That creates demand for healthcare institutions to meet consumers where they are.”

This is borne out in data from “The Digital Platform Promise: What Baby Boomers and Seniors Want From Digital Healthcare Platforms,” a PYMNTS and Lynx collaboration. It noted, among other key findings, that 78% of baby boomers and seniors who received test results digitally had satisfactory experiences. Those who used digital channels to make healthcare-related payments or schedule appointments were nearly as likely to feel satisfied, at 73% and 72%, respectively.

Getting Swamped by the Silver Tsunami

Of vital importance in this national conversation is the readiness of the healthcare ecosystem to accommodate legions of newly minted digital-savvy seniors, and on the flip side, moving away from the Web 2.0 portals many providers use, and replacing them with unified platforms that handle everything from scheduling to results, and a great deal more, all in one place.

Commenting on the so-called “silver tsunami” of Americans aging into their Medicare years each day, Boudreaux said, “Traditionally the healthcare system … has been not prepared for this wave of folks with different expectations. One of the reasons why I started Endear with my co-founder was that we wanted to give health plans all the tools … to be successful as this new wave hits them. I don’t think they’re prepared.”

Then there’s the fact that Medicare is a direct-to-consumer (D2C) product and not an employer-provided health plan. It means that competition for members is fierce, especially as these plans have been traditionally sticky, with members rarely leaving once they make their choice.

Renfro expanded on that, saying that the system is filled not only with a tangle of portals but with what he called “legacy repurposed technology from the gift card space or from the EBT and food stamp space that [is like] trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.”

That creates bad experiences, but unlike before, digital makes changing plans easier, so this needs attention.

That’s where FinTechs like Lynx and Endear Health are driving change in member experience, streamlining supplemental benefits, over-the-counter (OTC) and healthy food funds in ways that are “more comparable to what they experience in their personal lives with a USAA type of financial instrument,” or from their financial institutions, he said.

It also ends up as a “single source of truth” discussion, which is what many consumers, not just boomers and seniors, are seeking in their digital dealings from health to wealth, he added.

Boudreaux called this trend “the centralization of trust.” Older consumers have been warned for years about clicking random links and responding to unknown emails from companies they’ve never heard of.

“When a service is provided by someone like a health plan, they want them to do all of that vetting,” he said. “They want the trust to flow through [the plan]. This population isn’t going to download five, six, seven different applications. It’s one of the reasons why a centralized location for all their … healthcare needs or app needs … can drive engagement.”

Lynx and Endear Health are two examples of unified platforms that bring these disparate elements together for plans, and more importantly for consumers.

“If I am a Medicare Advantage member, and it’s similar to a commercial health plan member, think about the complicated nature of just the cards that are in my wallet,” Renfro said. “I have my AARP card, I have my Medicare card, I’ve got my … Medicare Advantage card, I might have a GoodRx card for prescription savings, and I might have a supplemental benefits card to manage OTC healthy food utilities with a true payment mechanism. That’s confusing.”

It’s also a huge opportunity to streamline how people understand and use their benefits.

Benefits for Patients and Plans Alike

Health plans and providers must undergo the same digital modernization as other sectors, and in some ways more so given the criticality of their services. But that’s becoming easier as application programming interfaces (APIs) and unified platforms come to market with powerful feature sets and easy integrations.

Right now, much valuable data is not being used to create the experiences that older consumers especially want and need, and that’s going to have to change as more decisions are made digitally.

“The baseline of even having the data for a plan being able to recognize, similar to how your credit card company knows when a card was swiped, who was the merchant, what was the amount in dollars, did they potentially buy a candy bar with a health incentive card? That feedback loop does not come in today to the plans,” Renfro said.

It’s a missed opportunity that’s sure to cause retention problems as the older consumers aging into Medicare now are more digitally literate and know what a good experience looks like. For plans, it pays off in knowing who did or did not use a supplemental benefit like a gym membership or a food benefit. That data helps improve plan design in a responsive way.

As Boudreaux said, the ultimate metric is “Are the members retained? Are they happier? Do they stick around? Have they leveraged the things that you’re putting in front of them? I think the role of digital platforms is to say, look, your members were lured in by providers, by specific benefits, by formularies, whatever, but they’re sticking around because they’re getting all this extra utility from the plan. It’s more of a retention tool than a bring-them-in tool.”