Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dan Hickey, SVP of Products at Alliance Health (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What do you make people do? Somebody who is depressed, is that person engaging?

Dan Hickey: They are engaging with others. They are sharing stories, motivating each other, helping each other, etc. Empathy in communities goes a long way.

SM: Mobile apps are also community apps?

DH: That is correct. The apps allow our members to connect with others.

SM: So, the entire portfolio of apps as well as the online sites are about community?

DH: No. The apps are particularly focused on community. On the desktop side, you can actually get a lot more content and a slightly different offering than you do on the mobile app side.

SM: It is a combination of content and community?

DH: Yes. It is content, community, products, and services. We think we are in a relationship business. We have created a patient engagement platform that tries to look at the whole patient. If you have a chronic condition, it is not just about social and support needs. You have needs for products and services, information, expert trusted advice, etc. To the extent that we partner with the Mayo Clinic, for example, we have the expert advice. We certainly have the peer-to-peer support, we are engaged with healthcare services and product companies all the time.

So, we are beginning to offer more products and services to our members. I don’t think anybody does it extremely well, but our goal is to serve the whole patient and really empower them through their health journey – in many cases that journey lasts a lifetime – and try to move them from relatively inactive participants in that journey to very active participants with the support of the community behind them.

SM: And your thesis on why your applications have stickiness is because of that relationship factor? People connecting with other people helping them get through their day? Is that what is driving the stickiness of your apps?

DH: Yes, absolutely. They are finding like-minded people in the apps.  That is very powerful, and it is safe, too. It is a safe place. Users can have an anonymous user ID. They don’t have to come in and have everything they do in that community posted on Facebook. So, it is safe and trusted and they are finding the people they are looking for once they download our apps.

What we are seeing in our mental health apps – our leading apps – is more engagement. If you look at a basic engagement metric such as page views per unique visitor, our mobile engagement in mental health surpasses all the KPIs [key performance indicators] that we do on the desktop side. This reinforces the idea that mobile is obviously a direction we want to go and will continue to go. We see the consumer is very comfortable in the mobile space engaging with others in communities.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dan Hickey, SVP of Products at Alliance Health
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