Our guest on the latest episode of The Next Big Thing in Health podcast is Stacia Grosso, Staff VP of Digital Strategy & Operations at Anthem. Stacia talks about the explosion of telehealth services over the past year; how data can be used to deliver personalized, predictive health care; and how digital tools can address the COVID-19 crisis.
Listen to the full interview on Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, and Stitcher.
Matt Eyles: Do you think telehealth is here to stay in a post-pandemic world, and how is Anthem helping your members access telehealth services?
Stacia Grosso: I do think it’s here to stay. And I’m not saying that just as someone who works in the digital world, but also as a consumer and as a mom. The first time I accessed my Anthem telehealth benefit was actually a few years before the pandemic.
So, I’ve been a believer for a long time. I agree that the pandemic has given consumers the opportunity to see how convenient and consumer-centric virtual health care can be. And Anthem’s digital first approach provides consumers the opportunity to engage in these health care services through a spectrum of care. They can engage technology like chat bots to get information about their situation, they can engage in virtual care through a telehealth visit or texting. Obviously, there’s also in-person care. We want to meet consumers where they are.
Sometimes, we talk about digital care delivery and being a digital-first organization in terms that are hard to relate to. But I think there are things we are doing that we can relate to in real terms, and in real situations. For example, we’re piloting in some of our markets a device that can augment a telehealth visit with images inside of a child’s ear. So, for any parent who has woken up with a child who is screaming in pain from an earache, or a parent in a rural area who has a very long drive to physically access care, being able to talk to a doctor virtually and have them actually see inside the ear and diagnose an ear infection from that child’s bedroom—that’s lifechanging. These are the types of innovative solutions we’re working on, and that we believe can usher in a new era of health care for everyone.
Laura Evans: Let me ask you about data—I know Anthem has been using data and data insights to deliver personalized, predictive health care. What kind of data are you using, and how is it helping improve the health care experience for the members you serve?
Stacia Grosso: We have secure access to various aspects of our members’ health care journey and their data. We talk about our data really driving the three Ps: Personalization, Predictive, and Proactive.
By personalized, we mean signing into an app and having the data there so that you have personalized content. So, if I’m diabetic, it’s giving me data about my condition or tips about staying healthy, or recipes—whatever that might be. The data is helping personalize that content so that I can better manage my health.
We also want to use predictive modeling to give more proactive care. We want to use data to help members manage their care, but we’re also using that data in-house to better inform how we service our members.
We are also using data to predict and proactively call our members when we know they’ll probably be calling us. Talk about flipping the situation—we can now recognize a situation where we know our member is going to call us, so we’ll reach out first and help them solve their problem.
Our goal is to use data and insights to better serve every consumer. We really want to consider their medical, behavioral, social, and financial needs to support what best serves them.
We also take the security of our members’ data very seriously. We’re really committed to safeguarding that member data, and to utilizing that data only in ways that will benefit our members.
Matt Eyles: Over the past year, Anthem has developed a number of new digital tools to help public health officials address the COVID-19 pandemic. Can you speak about what those tools are and how they work?
Stacia Grosso: Within weeks in many cases, we developed a number of useful tools. We have our C-19 Explorer to help public officials and businesses. The tool provides interactive dashboards on specific data related to the risk and impact of COVID-19. It’s very useful as a decision-support tool for return to work and other decisions.
Anthem is a very large employer, and we utilized our experience as such. People who are making decisions about return-to-office policy may be sitting in Minneapolis making decisions that could affect employees in another part of the country. So, they really need access to reliable data that was aggregated from public sources to really understand what the conditions were in different areas. Because as we know, the pandemic affected different areas, at different times in different ways.
That tool was free. It was available to anyone who wanted to access that tool.