Blog

December 3, 2019

Meeting Healthcare Consumers’ Needs: Extending Technology to Enable High-Touch Navigation

There are a few common pain points we consistently hear from employers: healthcare costs continue to increase year after year; employee engagement in health and wellness resources remains a challenge; and administrative strain steadily builds as questions stemming from benefit confusion continue to plague benefits managers.

These are all major contributors to a trend with which we are well familiar: a growing need for services that will help employees better navigate the healthcare system and their corporate benefits. According to the Large Employers’ Health Care Strategy and Plan Design Survey from National Business Group on Health®, top priorities for employers going into 2020 include virtual care solutions and a more focused strategy to address high-cost claims, with many employers turning to high-touch services–something we have heard expressed by our customers as well. In fact, the survey reveals that the number of employers offering high-touch services is expected to jump from 39% to 60% in 2020.

In support of our customers’ needs and our ongoing mission to improve the healthcare experience, Castlight has announced the rollout of Castlight Care Guides, a unique service that combines the best of our personalized health navigation technology with a clinician-led high-touch service. Through our team of Care Guides, we help users understand the right next step for them on their healthcare journey based on the user’s clinical data, the impetus for the user’s outreach, evidence-based medicine guidelines, and their employer’s benefit offering and plan design.

Our approach to high-touch navigation is tech-first, extending our data-powered, digital navigation capabilities with well-trained, empathic human guides. As smartphone penetration grows to 85% in the US–and with people checking their smartphones an average of 52 times per day–it is important that we are able to leverage our tech-enabled navigation to connect with users to provide them with choice in how they engage with their benefits.

For a user who values convenience and a lightened administrative load, the combination of digital plus high-touch means an easy search for care within the app, with the help of a Castlight Care Guide to schedule an appointment and answer follow-up questions if confronted with a confusing claim. Alternatively, for users who may be less tech savvy or have low healthcare literacy, offering a one-to-one, human-powered solution in conjunction with our tech-enabled navigation allows Castlight to assist a much broader user base.

In order to cost-effectively target the appropriate users for high-touch interactions, Castlight Care Guides leverages our personalization engine, Genius. Genius provides tailored, data-driven recommendations to users, pulling from a broad set of data sources such as eligibility files, medical and pharmacy claims, health assessments, and in-app activity, to ensure users are taking the right next step in their health journey.

The personalization engine identifies individuals in population segments where gaps in care could be closed or users could be steered to higher-quality, higher-efficiency care, and invite them to connect with a Castlight Care Guide. For a user who receives a personalized care recommendation in-app but perhaps doesn’t see it or chooses not to engage with it, we are able to leverage our omni-channel communications approach to reach out to her via email and schedule a phone call at a time convenient for her. Through dialogue with our guide, we are able to develop a much deeper understanding of the user’s needs or barriers to care and understand how we can address her unique situational needs far better than we could without this multi-dimensional insight.

Through our tech-first approach, Castlight is able to more efficiently and affordably administer high-touch navigation services. Castlight Care Guides, built upon our digital health navigation platform that extends its services to include high-touch capabilities, offers a well-rounded solution to engage employees, eliminate benefit confusion, and steer them to the right care at the right cost.

Castlight has partnered with a select group of employer customers, including a Fortune 500 manufacturer, to enable collaboration through a Charter Customer Program that launched in November. Castlight will offer this new product more broadly to employers in mid-2020 as an add-on to our Care Guidance Navigator and Castlight Complete products.

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