Bringing Healthcare Consumerism Inside:
The Communications Campaign
By Frank Hone
EMPLOYEE BENEFIT NEWS - March 2, 2007
The essence of successful healthcare consumerism is behavior change. That will occur best with a concerted employee communications effort, smartly crafted and consistently delivered over time. The challenge for human resources and employee benefits managers is to educate executive management on the importance of this effort so that the right resources are allocated for it to happen in the right way, and then help deliver against the objectives.
In most companies, this is not the traditional function of HR or benefits. But in the new world of health care consumerism, these departments will have the added responsibilities of forging effective health-related communications strategies and message flows to the employee population. This may require the supportive expertise of an outside organization or the help of corporate communications to get it right. It may not be smooth sailing from the start, but when given the green light to lead the way, HR and benefits departments should shine. They need to be at the forefront of change, and this expanded role will be beneficial across the organization.
Behavior change is a process
Make no mistake: Changing health-related behavior is very difficult. Unlike most of their purchasing decisions, the vast majority of consumers do not choose to make health-related decisions and purchases; they are responding to a condition, illness or disease that needs to be addressed. In addition, most people - especially hard-working employees - claim they don't have time to take care of health-related actions - scheduling annual exams, filling prescriptions, exercising, eating right, etc.
Companies can begin to work toward changing the behavior of their people using the same principles of consumer behavior change that advertisers use. But the issues involved with health-related behavior change are quite different from what is required to initiate a trial of a new blend of coffee or a fruit juice drink. It is the lessons learned from 20 years of direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs that have real relevance for employee behavior change regarding healthcare. (See sidebar below.)
One of these lessons is that the process of behavior change occurs at various "paces" with different segments of the population. Companies, therefore, need to treat employee communication in the area of health care as a more holistic and regular process of engagement. That's a big change from the traditional approach so heavily weighted to the open-enrollment period each November.
In most organizations, there is little to no additional health-related communication throughout the rest of the year, except for the occasional flu shot day, charity run or blood drive. Yet, there are many areas of health-related dialogue and information sharing that can be leveraged at other times and throughout the year. Employers could, for instance, provide all employees with regular updates about important health topics in the news, while targeting selected populations with more relevant information. And, by using a third-party service, targeted disease-specific information and support can be provided to diagnosed individuals.
Communications is marketing
Think of this as a communications campaign much as you would if you were marketing a new product or service for your company. What do you know about your market now, and what additional information is required? What is your communications objective? How about your media plan? What is the timing of the messages? How will you know how effective it's been? All these and many more questions need to be identified and addressed.
A full planning process needs to be established with the marketing and communications team leaders. Market research, audience segmentation and creative strategy should all be components of the campaign that can lead to a more effective communication process. The same rigor and discipline that the brand marketing managers use in developing their campaigns should be used internally, with measurable objectives and outcomes.
These 10 steps can help create a robust and powerful path to meaningful change:
1. Identify the communications objectives. Be clear about what the company wants to convey, with whom and in what timeframe. Look at this with all aspects of employee healthcare in mind, along with the experience base of how it's been done traditionally.
2. Define the target audiences. While some messages do need to reach all employees, significant work can be done to build a segmentation scheme into the plan, so that individuals get information that is most relevant to them. Consumers generally don't respond to "Dear Resident" letters, and employees behave the same way. After all, they're consumers, too!
3. Build the strategic approach. Find out the barriers to change within the various segments of the employee population. It's a big step to move from "time to choose your provider" to an integrated communications program, so a bit of research is warranted here.
4. Outline the tactical approach. Think through the different incentives, offers and ideas that can be put to the population to encourage behavior change. Spend some time to see how other service providers reach out to their customer base to understand what might work well with your stakeholders.
5. Prepare the key messages. Build the storyline that will permeate the correspondences, presentations, newsletters, posters and group meetings. Make sure it is consistent with the objectives, oriented to positive change and aligned to the corporate culture (current and/or future).
6. Evaluate media choices. Consider all the ways that your people can get information from the company in your planning and selection process. Look at tactics like interactive communications, paycheck stuffers, town hall meetings and informal get-togethers. Everything counts and needs to be considered as vehicles for health-related messages. Health care doesn't happen once a year, it happens every single day.
7. Do the creative. Just like an advertising campaign, the messages must have impact. Work with communications experts with experience in soliciting behavior change. You are selling an important product.
8. Measure results. Plan the measurement step in advance. Test how well the campaign is performing in a number of ways and incorporate the learning back into the process.
9. Encourage feedback. Get people to talk back. Blogs, suggestion boxes, open forum. This is not just one-way communications - it needs to be interactive at some level to be truly effective.
10. Revisit the whole process with an eye to continual improvements. Just because "We did it like this last year," doesn't mean it's right. Be flexible to evolving. The world is changing; go with what works.
For companies just getting started, this will be challenging but worth the effort. For those at the leading edge of change, be open to sharing your best practices and lessons learned. Employee healthcare is an area where companies are banding together in unusual ways to share their experiences in finding ways to tame this beast of out-of-control insurance costs and unacceptable health outcomes. There is much to do, and a lot begins and ends with communications.
Lessons Learned from DTC
- Pharmaceutical marketers have advertised their brand and disease messages to consumers for more than 20 years. Those two decades have provided many lessons, some very relevant to employee communication:
- Strategic audience segmentation can lead to smarter and more effective message and media strategies to each group.
- Consumers follow a decision pathway from symptom recognition to effective treatment, dealing with multiple barriers along the way.
- Too much information at once is counterproductive; bite-sized pieces of data, support, encouragement and motivation can work together well.
- Consumers recognize the importance and value of warnings and contraindications, even though marketers fear their negative impact.
- Consumers generally do not choose to purchase healthcare products and services because they want to, but because they have to.
- Interactive communication opportunities are often more productive than "push" marketing - people want to participate in dialogue, not be told what to do.