Digital Fundamentals: Making Your Digital Transformation a Success

  • August 19, 2019
  • Blog Post
  • Kathleen Ellmore

Digital Fundamentals: Making Your Digital Transformation a Success

In consumer service organizations, your customer’s experience is truly the sum of your interactions with them. In healthcare, those touches can often be disjointed, one-size-fits-all and can still be primarily via paper or the member service center. In every other industry, consumers have raised their hands to say they prefer to interact digitally, and the good news is that they are starting to say that in healthcare as well. Why is this good news? Because health plans can improve the member experience while at the same time reducing costs.

At Engagys we work with health plans across the country to help them execute their digital transformations. The goal: transform the consumer experience to be as paperless as possible, and in the cases where print is essential, bring print capabilities into the 21st century.

Let’s talk about those 21st century capabilities. In most industries, we take for granted that digital channels can execute personalized messaging, leverage snackable taxonomies for short texts or slightly longer emails, generate electronic presentment of correspondence for archiving on searchable databases, and proactively orchestrate the customer experience. We are not there yet in healthcare, but we are making progress.

This is part one of a three-part blog: Digital Fundamentals.

Part One: Know Your Communications Inventory

  1. Understand what you are sending. We are helping our clients better manage, consolidate and rationalize their communications inventories. In some cases, inventories haven’t been assessed in 10+ years, and digging through the mass of templates and systems sometimes feels like being in the warehouse in that final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You can’t begin to get rid of waste, reduce overlap or find areas for improvement until you know your inventory. When was the last time you took a look?
  2. Identify important print attributes for historical and future print. Knowing what works and what doesn’t is an essential element of optimizing print management. Engagys, for example, evaluates 55 distinct attributes of a particular print piece that determine its success with healthcare consumers—driving consumer experience, lowering medical costs and improving outcomes. As plans embrace advanced techniques such as next best action attributes are critical to enable business rules that optimize the consumer experience.
  3. Create actionable categories for all print. Should this piece be digitized into an email, or digitally presented to a secure portal, or both? Is this piece even necessary? If it is, is print the optimal channel? Is this regulated? What are the digital preferences of your members? This analysis will provide critical understanding of how paperless you can be in the future. We find the usual categories are: Eliminate it, consolidate with similar pieces, digitize and present securely, digitize in an email or text, and/or increase adoption as it is already digitally presented.

Now let’s take it to the next step, making those categories actionable. Look forward to part two of this blog, where my partner Joel Radford will talk about the tools and technologies that enable personalization, snackable taxonomies and measurement and experience management.

For those of you excited to jump ahead, look for my part three where I will talk about optimizing the print that you have left after your rationalization/digital transformation exercise.

I’m excited to see how many of you are working towards going paperless! Click here to download our latest infographic on modernizing and reducing print.

Kathleen Ellmore



Ms. Ellmore is one of the earliest pioneers in bringing the best of consumer marketing and data driven methodologies to healthcare. Instead of getting you to eat when you are not hungry and buy things you don’t need, we can finally use the same strategies to instead change the health equation in America. Kathleen previously led the Consumer Engagement consulting practice for Welltok (formerly Silverlink) for 12 years, leveraging its data repository of over a billion consumer health interactions, the best of behavioral economics, and the latest in clinical research, to create evidenced-based communications on what works to drive consumer healthcare behavior yielding better outcomes and lower costs. She is often quoted in the trade and national press and is a regular speaker on the national stage, having spent the first twenty years of her career in brand marketing at leading consumer marketing organizations, including General Mills and P&G. Additionally, she was a Vice President at Digitas, a leading direct marketing firm. Recently she was selected as Consultant Member of the first ever FDA’s Patient Engagement Advisory Committee.