Here are some of his priorities, excerpted from our conversation:
Culture Change: “I don’t want to pretend that there aren’t obstacles, but they are obstacles of history, the cultural biases that we bring to every conversation. We recently rolled out a new portal for the annual enrollment process. What we have never done before is say: ‘Let’s rapidly prototype one in 30 days, trial it with a bunch of real consumers, get feedback, modify the next 30 days, get feedback again and so on.’ We would have typically come up with a six-month plan to build something, with no input from the people who are going to use it and then find out that we didn’t build it quite right.”
Customer Experience: “We are streamlining the prior authorization process to make it less cumbersome, both for providers and consumers … We predominantly serve seniors. They’re absolutely digitally engaged. Sometimes we get caught up in the bias that they’re not. This year we rolled out an event called the Cognitive Games, [games] like Bejeweled and Wordle. In the first week, we engaged a few hundred thousand people, so we knew we’d built something that they wanted. We’re out where consumers are, building a relationship with them. We’re not managing a payment transaction in the shadows.”
Leveraging AI: “Let me give you examples. We are rolling out ambient listening technology that takes the administrative burden of being a doctor off our doctors and allows them to spend more time with the patient. We have a new tool that we just rolled out for our brokers and sales agents that we refer to as Agent Assist that allows them to streamline a very complicated sales process.”
