Roni Mansur, the Vice President of Product Management at Mass General Brigham Health Plan, stressed the importance of timing in product development. “We’re all aware of, maybe have been involved in, products that were great ideas on paper. But we just didn’t make it work out. It just didn’t fit. There was no buyer, there was no customer. The timing was not right.” Mansur explained that his team focuses on three main time horizons: immediate needs, strategic partnerships, and future-focused vision. “The first one is really the the here and now, the immediate need that we have the things we have to do to keep our portfolio robust, competitive, and relevant in response to what the what our clients need, what the members need, what competitive threats are coming in, what opportunities there are! What changes there are in the ecosystem.” Lena Perelman, the Vice President of Medicare Product Operations at SCAN Health Plan, echoed this sentiment, emphasizing the need for precision in decision-making. “We take a really disciplined approach to determining when the timing is right for a new product by balancing things like member or prospect demand market trends, financial sustainability.” She highlighted the importance of continuous refinement and validation, stating, “We go out. We talk to our brokers, our district, our consultants, the distribution channel. We talk to our employer groups. We talk to our members. We talk to the each group, probably about 3 to 4 times a year and get feedback from them.”

Lena Perelman discussed SCAN Health Plan’s approach to creating niche products that cater to specific populations. “One size kind of doesn’t fit all anymore. And so what we’ve been doing on our side is really taking a tailored product approach to make sure that we can identify niche populations or niche products that address very specific needs for very specific populations, including health needs, cultural preferences, access barriers like seeing the right physicians, whether it’s based on language preferences or based on affirming care.” She provided examples such as SCAN Allied, focused on Asian communities, and SCAN Affirm, the first LGBTQ+ Medicare Advantage product. “We needed to ensure that we had a network that had vetted and affirming providers. So we went through an extensive process where we conduct, and we do an ongoing a survey to ensure with an external partner to ensure that these providers can actually provide the care to these members in an affirming and in a culturally appropriate way.”

Maria Baker, the Vice President of Health Strategy and Delivery at Highmark Health, discussed a recent shift towards a more holistic approach in benefit design. “What we did was we selected 4 or 5 of the key trend drivers. You know, the ones you’d expect: oncology, diabetes, joint degeneration couple others. We formulated a team that instead of just looking at an intervention or a benefit design approach or a Med policy change, we took the clinician-led approach, and had clinicians sit down and really dig into the journey of somebody who’s dealing with one of these conditions.” She emphasized the importance of cross-functional collaboration, “We use that to really build an end-to-end response to a particular condition and to drive value. And so that that allows us then, real time to balance the cost drivers, the quality drivers, the prevalence and make choices based on our particular member population at any given point and kind of removes that that silo approach that you’re talking about.”

Lena Perelman highlighted the importance of continuous feedback loops in healthcare product development. “There’s changes you can make for the next year, and then, of course, there’s even longer term changes when it comes to kind of vendor substitution and procurement. So you know, our strategy looks 2 years in advance, but in the short term we’re doing things on a daily basis, like looking at grievances, identifying what members are calling in about through a program we call voice of the customer. We’re adapting and using AI tools to look at and research and understand some of the call volume, and then that is shared directly with our operational teams who work with either our internal teams or our vendors to ensure that we’re shifting and pivoting in real time.”   Suzi Pigg, the Vice President of Payer Strategy at TytoCare, shared similar insights, emphasizing the need for continuous quality improvement. “We do white label it with our health plan partners. So this isn’t a separate member engagement channel you have to manage or introduce to your members. It’s an embedded technology under your virtual care strategy, that is presented as your health plan to your member. Roni touched on this, too, which I think is so important to the success that we’ve seen across some of our programs, which is that frequent and rigorous customer, feedback and validation of what we’re doing and constantly taking that in to be able to monitor the performance of what we’re trying to achieve with this virtual care strategy in this membership base.”