Dear Physician and Office Staff:

Over the last two years, the principle of customer-centricity has become the cornerstone of Humana’s strategy. Through this principle, we have redesigned our clinical initiatives, launched radical new products and substantially improved our customer service operations.

We believe that our success depends on helping consumers understand and embrace their clinical choices and responsibilities. This requires us to think about everything we do and every way that we affect our consumers, “through the consumer’s eyes.”

Our quest for customer understanding is leading us to reorganize ourselves to create advantage for our consumers and other customers. This is radical in the health benefits business. Our conviction is that by creating advantages that lead to less conflict and more “success” for our customers, we will build trust, loyalty and competitive advantage.

Consumers’ attitudes toward their health benefits company are deeply influenced by what happens when they see their doctor. If we can facilitate the consumers’ choices and make it easier for physicians to do business with Humana, we can help create an experience that is seamless and untroubled — and less costly and more efficient, too.

So that’s what we’re doing. You’ve read in these pages about our new clinical strategies, focused on providing decision support and reducing review. Over the summer, we told you about our innovative new ID card equipped with a magnetic strip that contains benefit information and also serves as a debit card for Flexible Spending and Personal Care Accounts and operates just like a standard credit card. This process innovation will reduce paperwork, waiting time and the need to pursue patients for payment. Soon we’ll be adding more features to simplify and economize the transaction so it will be even easier to take care of Humana members.

The key to creating a new experience for patients is learning how to listen. We’re setting up processes to capture information from all of our business customers. In this issue, we announce the creation of an editorial board to recommend ideas for this magazine. We want to thank the physicians and other staff who have offered their time to make this publication more relevant and useful to other physician practices.

Their suggestions will give us more than story ideas, however. Everything we learn about how to make the health care experience more efficient will feed our own “idea bin” for further process improvements.

We want to hear from you, too. Let us know your ideas about how we can create a superior experience for your patients — our members — our mutual customers.

Sincerely,

Jack Lord, M.D.
Chief Innovation Officer

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