Influence. How do you do this? How can you influence people to think and act in ways that improve their health status and extend life expectancy for themselves and their children?
You get the best shot at this by having face-to-face communication with your members with the intent to be their go-to resource for all things related to their care.
But, how do you find these people? Many of them want to be invisible to you and they have gotten pretty good at ignoring all the information bombarding them.
And when you find them and talk to them, how do you know if you are influencing them to get preventive services? You can log 10 conversations with a member, but that does not mean she will see her healthcare provider. So you chat her up and hope she will. But, you don’t know if you are having any success until you see your HEDIS scores.
We spend considerable time thinking about this problem and we are making some headway on it.
First, we find people by using our tried and true methods for connecting with members face to face. It’s a combination of knowing where to look, how to look for your members and who to send out there looking for your members.
We take the time to understand the fabric of a community – how the community is organized. We find the block captains – they are the link between the neighbors. We find out who the influencers are. Many times this is a minister or a social service agency leader. We talk to them and ask how we can help them accomplish their objectives. Then we help them and they get to know us.
We figure out where people like to meet and we create a “water cooler” environment where people can engage in light-hearted conversation with our culturally matching community health workers in a non-threatening way.
We know that talk is not cheap, though. At the end of the day, the conversation has to get results in the form of people seeing their healthcare providers. This is the heart of the question about influence.
We focus on this problem quite a bit as well. When we talk to members who need to get preventive services, we look for predictive behaviors that are easy to spot and that can place a member in a compliant cohort or noncompliant cohort. Then we spend more time with the compliant cohort, which are the members we think we can influence.
These predictive behaviors are things members do, things members say, and life experiences members have. We can link this information to the likelihood that the member is going to take certain actions. For example, if a member has moved in the last six months and expects to move again in the next six months, it is unlikely that this member will join the compliant cohort.
Click the video to hear how we influence people.