Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Torben Nielsen, Co-Founder of HealthSparq (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Great. This is very interesting. What percentage of the health plan market has adopted solutions like this such that consumers can access this facility today?

Torben Nielsen: It’s a great question. We do an annual survey here at HealthSparq surveying 1,600 health plan executives. We just completed our second annual survey. What it shows is that health plans really are very interested in these transparency tools. Where they really fall short, oftentimes, is in ensuring that the members really know that this type of data and these types of shopping tools are available to them.

Traditionally, health plans are big and large. They are still very new to the element of consumerism, if you will, and talking more proactively to their members. What we’ve realized at HealthSparq is that a lot of members are asking for this information especially with plans coming out where you have deductibles that are really high. You end up paying more and more out of your pocket. Individuals are starting to ask, “If I have to pay $10,000 out of my pocket because I’m on a high-deductible health plan, I want to be able to shop.” We’re now starting to work with health plans not just on providing the SaaS-based platform to their members but also giving them advice on marketing campaigns or awareness campaigns into their memberships to make sure that they’re aware and start utilizing some of these tools. We know that if they start utilizing these tools, they actually see savings. The members will see actual savings. The overall healthcare will see savings.

We all know healthcare is very expensive. It’s 15% of GDP and is projected to increase even more. Any savings that we can take out of the system is a good thing. We did a longitudinal study with one of the health plans that’s our client. We looked at people that utilize the online shopping tool. What kind of claims do they have versus people that have not used any of the online shopping tools? What kind of claims behavior do they see? We actually looked at the actual claims of this population. We compared the ones that have utilized our shopping tools against the ones that never signed up for the website. We just looked at three conditions. We saw significant savings for the individual member as well as for the health plan. If you extrapolate the savings over a two-year period, it was as much as $50 million across the membership and for the particular health plan. That’s exciting. Not only is it only improving the experience where you feel that you are actually a consumer that’s more informed, but you also start feeling much more empowered.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Torben Nielsen, Co-Founder of HealthSparq
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