Healthcare First Look at cross-entity customer service.
Health plans today face a higher hurdle to satisfying customers than most firms because they commonly outsource major service operations to prescription and disease management vendors. Thus, crafting a unified, cross-channel -- and cross-entity -- customer service experience is key to preventing member frustration and enabling higher use of low-cost self-service options.

What should health plans do? Forrester analyst Liz Boehm says, "Because plans can't fix problems they can't identify, we developed a customer experience scorecard that pinpoints common service failures. Critical cross-channel service capabilities include consistency of data and language, the ability to save a transaction midstream, and in-process status notices, all of which enable customers to make incremental progress at each step of a cross-channel service scenario."

Later this month, look for Liz's second brief in her three-part series on fixing health plans' member services, in which she reveals Forrester's scoring of the cross-entity service capabilities of prominent plans.

Out-of-reach drug costs are a hot consumer issue and Forrester expects many major health plans to fuel the fire by deploying new side-by-side drug comparison tools on their Web sites in 2003. With some personalization enhancements, such as better configuration tools from companies like Dell, these apps will give consumers bold new powers like the ability to distinguish drugs by side-effect severity, sort them by personal preferences, and understand pricing nuances. We expect increasing cost and quality transparency to put formulary practices under the microscope this year.

The EMR tipping point is upon us, and some dominoes are going to finally fall. According to Eric Brown, "EMR adoption is accelerating due to market forces, not the several technological improvements these apps have seen in the past couple of years. First, doctors follow their peers, and the herd is moving. Then you have HIPAA security rules that demand automation. Finally, payment for quality from firms like WellPoint and GE means less money for providers that don't automate."

With more EMRs in use and the FDA proposing bar coding for drugs, computerized physician order entry, CPOE, will begin to move from pipe dream to reality. Mike Barrett believes that to avoid errors upfront, EMRs must link with clinical decision support vendors to build drug-interaction and evidence-based medicine edits into the prescribing process.

What happens when EMRs meet clinical trials? By mid-decade, Forrester foresees a major shift in the way drug firms fill their clinical trial rosters. When we compare the database features of the four major contenders in the recruitment services race, EMR vendors that collaborate with consortia of institutions make the most compelling story. Mike Barret says, "Not only will these EMR-driven consortia have fresher and more relevant data for recruiting, but they will also be able to underprice the other contenders. Pharma should begin to line up its EMR relationships now."

Our latest consumer data is in, and we will now begin profiling consumers' technology ownership and attitudes by disease and by health plan. Let me know what you want to learn from this new resource or what additional services you need us to deliver by replying to this email address with your thoughts. Thanks.


Brad Holmes
Research Director

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