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Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to go to the annual Care Continuum Alliance Forum, a conference for dozens of disease management companies and health plans. It is a great opportunity to share the latest trends and perspectives on U.S. member/patient engagement. I had the chance to join several interesting conversations on the topic. Here are some thought-provoking factoids that came up during our dialogues:

• Messaging to consumers in the U.S. is rising at a prolific rate – at least an 11% growth, if not more, when you look across email, texting, and voice.
• Disease management companies are really wrestling with four problems:
  1. How to segment their member populations so that they can initiate the right engagement campaign to the right group. To get the segmentation right, they are looking at lots of analytics tools to "bucket" groups of patients into right-sized clusters, for whom they apply the right techniques.
  2. Once they get members segmented, they all admit they aren't getting the member engagement/adherence they want. So, they can segment, and get lots of information, but they can't accomplish compliance/adherence goals. This is obviously a big frustration.
  3. Phone access: most admitted they can't get members on the phone with nurses or call center staffs, at the right time or skill level they want. So they know they are trying to accomplish a Sysiphean task. ( remember, rock up the hill Greek guy ? )
  4. Most admitted they need to do more outbound, proactive interception of the patient/member.

In sampling about 40 people in one meeting, a high percentage admitted they hadn't yet achieved the right balance between personal dialogue with members and automated intervention. And economically, they all admitted that their budgets for staff are NOT going up at a prolific rate. Yet they are under pressure to do "better" next year. So there is a real squeeze going on. They have to do more, but with flat budgets at best.

It is clear that our healthcare economy spend can't go up. In one CCA executive meeting, CEOs and senior vice presidents of major health management companies, insurers and industry consultants acknowledged that cost has to come out of the service chain somewhere. At 16 percent of our U.S. GDP, we can't have costs continue to rise. There just isn't the money.

All companies are on the hunt for better efficiency. Efficiency came to the car industry. To the financial industry. Now efficiency is "in" at healthcare companies. And patient/member interaction is a huge potential cost zone. Talking to 100 million disease management members a year, just in the U.S., could cost up to $25 billion. Companies just can't absorb that cost. They need to put that money into their member communications infrastructure, considering the regulatory mandates they are all urgently striving toward.

So more, personalized, targeted, patient reminder technology has to happen. Our economy has digital consumers; who are now "digital" patients. For instance, a recent study out of the University Health Network in Toronto shows patients are far more likely to use their blood pressure monitors if they receive automatic phone calls or texts reminding them to perform the checks, or alerting them to negative trends in their results.

My Prediction: patient/member digital engagement will continue to rise, and accepted methods for reminding, informing and "nudging" patients into action, will only get more frequent, more accepted, and more sophisticated. What do you think?