« Americans held hostage by insurance companies »

There is a flurry of debate going on in the United States.  Politicians are at town hall meetings listening to people's opinions on reforming health care -- and many meetings are quite heated.  President Obama this past weekend held a town hall meeting where he critized opponents of health care reform on their "scare tactics".  Obama said Americans should no longer be "held hostage by health insurance companies".

It's obvious there is still much confusion on the details of the bill.  Realistically who has time to read a thousand pages of legal jargon.  However it does seem that insurance companies will be making the most change or have the most to lose if this bill goes through.

So what can people and companies in the health insurance business do to mitigate the change.  First there is opportunity for those willing to search for it.  Within chaos there is opportunity, as they say.  This could be an excellent time to think differently than your competition!  Perhaps provide more/better service to retain customers and capture customers not satisfied with the competition.

It is well known that "technology has changed every other industry but health care".  And I think this is where the most competitive differentation can happen.  Are you looking at automated health information systems?  Automating the integration of data with third parties, hospitals, stop loss carriers, or outsourced care managers?  Plus you can't ignore leveraging the internet.

Information sharing and data analysis are two areas that we've seen benefit other industries tremendously with reduced costs, less manual intervention, and more focus on improving the business instead of operational (and menial) tasks.  Automation.

If there is one area that should be looked at for improvement is the use of Excel spreadsheets in your organization.  They are quick and easy to use but have serious draw backs.

Excel hell: term used to describe the significant manual effort spent using desktop spreadsheets to analyze data and produce reports.

 Here are some of the costs to using desktop spreadsheets:

• Lack of security - easy to email a spreadsheet of data that cannot be tracked.
• Lack of auditing - once a spreadsheet is emailed out, revisions and updates are hard to track.
• Worker mobility - hard to access your data from anywhere and tethered to your desktop.
• Collaboration - coworkers have a difficult time sharing and managing multiple spreadsheets for the group.
• Backup - are desktops being backed up or are the central servers being used to store these spreadsheets.

There are more if you think about it long enough.  This is one tip for looking at your organization for improving beyond the competition.  We'll post other tips for being more competitive soon.