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HealthEdge has identified five key attributes that drive digital payers, enabling them to rise above the competition and lead the way to better outcomes across the entire healthcare delivery system.

Digital Health Payers focus on:

1. Improving end-user and member centricity
2. Achieving higher levels of quality
3. Increasing transparency
4. Advancing customer service
5. Reducing transaction costs

In this five-part blog post series, we’re diving deeper into each attribute, delivering resources, information, and insights to enable health plans to transform into digital health payers. As we continue the conversation around what it means to be a digital payer, this discussion focuses on ever-increasing quality.

Achieving Higher Levels of Quality

While high quality care and service is top of mind for all health insurance payers, digital payers constantly strive to improve quality and do so by leveraging modern, digital platforms. For these organizations, quality is a mind-set in which every aspect of the business focuses on improving.

As traditional payers transform into digital payers, there are three key areas in which the organization should focus on improving quality that will deliver the greatest impact on the entire healthcare delivery system – communication, data, and care.

Improving Quality in Communications

Today, communication occurs through a variety of channels including portals, phone, email, telehealth, and face-to-face conversation. Without a single view of these communications, key stakeholders can easily be left in the dark, resulting in less accurate claims and reimbursements and jeopardizing optimal health outcomes for members.

To improve quality in communication, digital payers can:

• Provide access to accurate, real-time information to those who need it
• Consolidate or integration communication channels to reduce the number of touch points
• Make real-time data more accessible to care managers and customer service team members facilitating communication between stakeholders
• Leverage true integration between digital health solutions across the entire health delivery system.

The CMS National Quality Strategy includes a goal of the program to Embrace the digital age, explaining that quality can increase when organizations, “Ensure timely, secure, seamless communication and care coordination between providers, plans, payers, community organizations, and patients through interoperable, shared, and standardized digital data across the care continuum to achieve desired outcomes and provide patients direct access to their information. 

• The CMS National Quality Strategy: A Person-Centered Approach to Improving Quality

In addition to HealthEdge’s inherent capability to share real-time data across lines of business, functional departments, and third-party systems, Wellframe (HealthEdge’s digital member engagement platform) takes collaboration one step further by facilitating real-time communication and insights between care managers, customer service representatives, and members.

Improving Data Quality

Digital payers strive for excellence in making high-quality, accurate data more accessible. The result? More accurate, trustworthy data is available for better contract negotiations, more automated claims processing, and smarter business decisions.

Accurate data also improves claims accuracy, saving time and cutting costs due to less rework and fewer under/over payments. Digital health payers use technology and innovation to improve data quality through:

• Establishing a central source of truth and data standards to create and maintain quality data
• Integrating disparate systems to improve access to accurate data
• Leveraging automation to improve accuracy and eliminate manual steps in which data discrepancies could be introduced
• Implementing innovative tools to extract, use, and share valuable data across the care continuum.

Improving Care Quality

Health plans have an opportunity to positively impact care quality as a digital payer. Digital payers use technology and information to constantly improve quality of care for their members by streamlining processes, improving care coordination, and enabling better care decisions.

Digital Payers can improve care quality by:

• Connecting with members in meaningful ways, delivering information and guidance at the right time
• Improving care decisions by enabling greater access to valuable health and benefit information to care managers and providers when they need it
• Facilitating better care coordination between members, providers, caregivers, and members
• Leveraging technology to improve member engagement through mobile-friendly applications and portals.

As digital payers strive for ever-increasing quality across their organizations, they enjoy the added benefits of more informed provider networks, lower operating costs, higher efficiencies, and better outcomes for their members.

Learn more about how HealthEdge can help your health plan improve quality through digital transformation at www.healthedge.com or [email protected].

5 Attributes of a Digital Health Payer

Rising consumer expectations, growing regulatory requirements, changing payment models, and new market opportunities are causing significant disruption across the health insurance marketplace. As a result, health plans are rethinking the traditional ways they do business and turning to digital technologies to help them respond.

HealthEdge offers health plans a digital foundation on which they can transform their organizations into digital payers to meet the demands of these new market dynamics more effectively.

But what does it mean to be a digital health payer? HealthEdge has identified five key attributes that drive digital payers, enabling them to rise above the competition and lead the way to better outcomes across the healthcare delivery system.

Digital health payers turn to technology to help them:

1. Improve end-user and member centricity
2. Achieve higher levels of quality
3. Increase transparency
4. Advance customer service
5. Reduce transaction costs

In this five-part blog post series, we will dive deeper into each attribute, delivering resources, information, and insight to enable health plans to transform into digital health payers.

Let’s get started. First, we dive into the topic of improving end-user and member centricity.

Improving End-user and Member Centricity

Today’s economy is all about the experience. Whether the experience is in healthcare, retail, dining or entertainment, a heightened focus on the consumer experience is front and center for all business leaders. The evolution is being driven by consumers’ everyday experiences with digital giants like Amazon and Google. Consumers are experiencing new levels of simplicity, personalization, ease of communication, instant access to information, and seamless connectivity across every location, space, or device where they might seek to interact with the company.

Payers, providers, employers, pharmacies, and all healthcare stakeholders are taking notice and prioritizing the consumer experience. Some are even calling it the “digital front door.” But in healthcare, the member experience goes beyond protecting or generating revenue and satisfaction. It actually impacts member outcomes, which is at the core of what payers were originally created to do.

Payers have an opportunity to lead the way by putting the member at the center of their digital transformation. Now is the time for health plans to become attune to member needs and transform their interactions to improve the experience – and the outcomes for members and for their own organization’s success.

Member Challenges

Today, members navigate a hodgepodge of interactions to effectively understand, manage, and pay for their care. They research providers online and through multiple plan-provided sources, working to piecemeal information and understand which providers are in-network, deliver quality care, have availability, and are within their preferred geographic area.

When seeking care, members also struggle to get insight into pricing, coverage, and benefits, making it even more difficult to pick the right path. As a result, healthcare consumers often lack strong guidance to direct their care decisions, especially when multiple specialties or providers are involved.

After seeking care, understanding claims and payment processes becomes even more complex. Consumers often make payments through multiple channels and access points, creating frustration for the member as well as administrative burden on the health plan and provider.

Finding a Solution

To address the challenges members experience in today’s environment, it requires payers to have a sharp focus on the member, which is difficult to do when their many different, disparate systems cannot talk to each other. However, digital payers using modern systems can do this through three ways:

• Deliver resources and information to coordinate care and navigate members through the care delivery system in a way that promotes better health
• Implement technology systems that put the member first – easy to access, single point of information
• Collaborate with other stakeholders to effectively integrate systems based on real-time data in a way that makes it easy for their care managers and members to navigate.

Considerations to Becoming Member-Centric

As health plans contemplate their digital transformation journeys, leaders should address the following questions:

• What is the process members will follow to obtain information about their health, benefits, coverage, care plans, and payments? How can we make this process more seamless and intuitive?
• Across each member touch point, how is information being shared? How can we make this information more accurate, up-to-date, and available in real-time across each point of access?
• How are our processes, technology, and information improving health outcomes for consumers? What more can we do?

Get started with HealthEdge

HealthEdge enables payers to become digital payers by providing a digital foundation on which they can build a more consumer-centric approach to member and provider interactions. When digital payers implement a transformative digital strategy that puts the member and users first, everyone can more effectively navigate the complexities of the current health insurance landscape, while improving health outcomes and reducing the cost of care for everyone.

To learn more about how HealthEdge can help your organization become more end-user and member-centric, visit www.healthedge.com or email [email protected].

The old saying goes, “If you’ve seen one state Medicaid program, you’ve seen one state Medicaid program.” The increasingly complex and dynamic state-by-state regulatory and payment environment across Medicaid has become nearly impossible for Medicaid-managed care plans to keep up with the pace of change and scale their Medicaid lines of business.

With varying fee schedules that get updated at different intervals and policy updates that can change on a dime, most health plans have accepted the fact that much of the work required to keep up with Medicaid has to be done manually.

In fact, in a July 2022 HealthEdge survey of more than 400 health plan leaders serving Medicaid populations, 91% reported that they depend on human resources to manually perform this work on a monthly or quarterly basis.

During normal times, keeping up with these complexities can be challenging and expensive, but also rewarding for those organizations who get it right.

However, we are not living in normal times.

The healthcare industry has been hit hardest by “the great resignation” as the survey results show that 89% of health plans are experiencing clinical and administrative shortages.

The combination of severe workforce shortages and intense reliance on manual resources to maintain accurate and timely Medicaid payment data has introduced new risks for many health plans. More specifically, survey respondents claimed their top five challenges to be:

• Staying compliant with changing reimbursement policies, 75%
• Installing updates to the fee schedule in a timely manner, 62%
• Having transparency within your system to response to audits, 54%
• Keeping up with changing fee schedules, 50%
• Too many manual processes, 33%

To date, there has been very little innovation and automation in this space due to the unique, state-specific schedules and policies. But that is changing with Source, the prospective payment integrity solution from HealthEdge.

Source dramatically improves efficiencies when it comes to Medicaid claims processing by automating the delivery of in-depth, state-specific fee schedules and payment policies across a wide range of facility and professional provider types.

The Source team has an aggressive plan to leverage their renown Medicare expertise and content development and apply it to state Medicaid programs. And they’re moving fast, already delivering schedules and policies every two weeks for many states. Their goal is to cover 35 states over the next few years. The Source solution for Medicaid programs also includes a comprehensive range of provider types such as hospital inpatient, hospital outpatient (HOPD), professional services, suppliers, home health agencies, hospice organizations, nursing facilities, dialysis centers, and ambulatory surgery centers.

To learn more about how our focus on automating state Medicaid updates can help your organization, talk to a Source specialist at www.healthedge.com/products-services/burgess-source.

The first tool to automate repricing of claims, variance reports for over and under payments and monitoring of retroactive changes.

Today, payers looking to reconcile inaccurate payments rely on laborious manual processes, multiple (and disparate) vendor solutions, and toggling between multiple interfaces—resulting in inefficiency and waste.

Source’s Retroactive Change Manager alleviates these issues by automating:

• Monitoring of retroactive changes
• Reconciliation of inaccurate claims
• Repricing of claims by payers
• Variance reports displaying all claims needing adjustment and by how much

With this tool, payers can manage pricing, editing, configuration and policy updates internally from a single API.

For all retroactive regulatory updates, the Retroactive Change Manager automatically reprices affected claims. For configuration updates, users can run ad hoc jobs and reprice affected claims.

Additionally, no other vendors currently offer flagging of under payments to providers. By addressing under payments health plans will decrease provider abrasion and become more compliant with CMS audits.

The Retroactive Change Manager is deployed within minutes and seamlessly integrates into current claim adjudication processes. Health plans can continue to reprocess and adjudicate claims using their current methods requiring no additional resources or attention from internal teams.

How is the Retroactive Change Manager different from current retroactive solutions?

1. Comprehensive Pricing and Editing Management in 1 Platform

All claim pricing and editing activities are conducted in 1 cloud-enabled platform. This allows for an optimized user experience without toggling between interfaces. It also automates content updates into a single environment, to eliminate time-consuming and costly manual updates to multiple software solutions.

2. Identification of Underpayments

For health plans, identification of under payments prevents provider abrasion and helps maintain compliance with CMS. Vendor solutions working off contingency models are disincentivized to offer underpayment flagging simply because it is not as profitable to them.

3. Automation: Requires 0 Lift from Internal Teams

The unique automation capabilities of Source conducts optimized contract management without any internal lift from health plan teams.

Why haven’t health plans leveraged automated claims variance reports before now?

Any claims automation activities built in-house require significant upfront capital, time, and resources, which leads health plans to often outsource these activities to vendor solutions. But vendor solutions have traditionally focused on the most profitable activities to them: retroactively chasing payments.

Today, however, payers are realizing the benefits of prospective payment integrity, and understand that to achieve long-term payment integrity goals, they must invest in cloud-enabled, single-API solutions that enable productivity and provide complex business insights.

Payers are demanding more from their vendor solutions—and rightfully so. Equipping payers with the tools they need to improve provider relationships and member experience begins with delivering authentic transparency into the inner workings of claims IT ecosystem.

Will this technology cause current IT systems to run slower?

Source ensures health plan IT systems will continue to operate as efficiently as before.

Repricing happens off internal production servers.

Activities are also strategically scheduled for when IT systems have greater bandwidth.

In addition, health plans can customize how often reports are run, permitting scheduled and ad hoc reporting.

How long will implementation take?

For current Source clients, full implementation takes under an hour and requires no effort from your internal teams.

When will this tool be available?

The Retroactive Change Manager will be available in Q4 2022.

States are about to get help for mental healthcare and substance use treatment because of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act signed by the President in June. Some of this will flow through Medicaid programs, specifically the Medicaid Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs) nationwide created in 2014.

The Act also supports:

• Increased telehealth flexibility
• Pediatric mental healthcare and training for pediatricians
• One-time funding ($150 million) for the existing Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or 988 crisis number, similar to the 911 system. (States have a preexisting July 16 deadline to have these up and running.)
• School-based mental health services, crisis intervention and violence prevention, and mental health worker training

While mental health advocates are pleased by the new support, there are caveats.

• Experts agree the mental health and substance use disorder impact of the pandemic has been significant and is still being felt. Future needs are expected to be long-lasting. Some predict the impact to last a generation.
• A lack of psychiatric beds continues to be an issue. While crisis stabilization can reduce harm and identify resources, inpatient care is hard to come by in most states, resulting in emergency-room boarding and a revolving door through the justice system for the seriously mentally ill, who are often overlooked in mental health programs.
• Provider shortages continue to be a concern, although telehealth flexibilities may help mitigate them in the short term.
• Equity continues to be an issue throughout the system and mental health is no exception.

Sensing the opportunity in addressing mental health, private investors had poured $3.1 billion into mental health ventures by the third quarter of 2021 – a third of all digital health funding for that year. Technology isn’t likely to replace the human touch, but innovation and technology can certainly have a role in improving access.

Anticipating inflationary pressures around healthcare costs, the IRS has spiked limits for 2023 on Health Savings Accounts (HSA) by 5.5 percent, much higher than the previous year’s rise of just 1.4 percent. These figures were released in April so payers can get the jump on rate-setting and employers can begin to plan their open enrollment periods.

The new calculations are:

• Self-only HSA contribution limits – $3,850, up from $3,650 in 2022
• Family HSA contribution limits – $7,750 up from $7,300 in 2022

The 2023 limits are intended to encourage employers during open enrollment to ease employees into HSAs and to boost employee dollar contributions. Employers are reportedly more interested in financing HSAs than before, especially for lower-paid employees.

More broadly, some of the cost drivers and variables for 2023 include the “table stakes” that employers add or expand mental health coverage to their offerings. Pandemic-related costs for treatment and testing are flattening, but there’s no predicting whether other COVID variants will emerge or whether a fall spike will occur as in previous years. Intuitively, it might seem that provider costs would rise across the board, but many are locked into multi-year arrangements and thus provider inflation trends usually lag the rest of the economy. For the segment of the provider/payer market up for contract renewal, negotiations are expected to be fierce – a major healthcare publication used the word “bloody” to describe the battles ahead.

Other uncertainties hang over the payer ecosystem, especially for possible Medicaid disenrollment and the potential end of pandemic-related subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums. These effects of these shifts in the risk pool are hard to pinpoint but can draw employer-sponsored plans into inflationary patterns. Some states are requesting that payers submit rate approvals in two sets – one for the scenario in which Congress extends ACA subsidies set to expire at year-end and one in which it does not.

Other variables being mentioned by experts for 2023 are utilization patterns and cost-impacts or savings from telehealth, tweaks to the ACA “family glitch” and movement among small employers to self-funded or level-funded plans.

Employers should be looking now at their health plan options in anticipation of open enrollment this fall Their calculus is a difficult one, just as it is for payers.