The Unfulfilled Promise Of Health-Plan-Owned Digital Health And Wellness Platforms

The rising cost of care, regulatory limits on administrative spend, the emergence of private exchanges, and defined contribution models have sent health plans scrambling to revisit their digital strategies and eBusiness road maps. A parade of vendor-driven consumer applications, combined with the lack of a vision by health plans for customer-facing interfaces, has created a complex landscape of digital health and wellness tools. Forrester believes the emergence of health-plan-owned consumer-facing platforms that connect members to a broad array of health services are a step in the right direction, but early forays do not connect with consumers at mass levels. Health plans must figure out how to create ongoing, contextually relevant, connected health offerings for their members in order to generate the engagement levels they project from these efforts. This report, the first in a series on health payer and provider digital strategies, examines some of the problems and opportunities associated with early health insurer digital health and wellness platforms.