POST ONE: SECONDARY RESEARCH

During a meeting on October 17th, we looked into and referenced the information that was given by the Premera team and deliberated on what details we needed more clarification on. 

The meeting began with an establishment of a general knowledge base of health care in the United States and a basic understanding of Obama Care. We thought this was an effective base point, since not all of the members of the team were familiar with how the current health care system functioned in the United States. 

We then logged on www.premera.com to simulate an experience with working with the current Find-A-Doctor functionality and to gain a fundamental understanding of what Premera had currently implemented to their system. We learned of some of its features, examined some of the information present to the users, and discussed of introductory methods of improving the experience. 

Our team was very interested in the interactions between doctors, Premera, and its customers, and how and what information could be accessed between the three entities. In addition, we were intrigued with other types of rating-based infrastructure that are used on websites such as Yelp and Reddit, and how we could integrate such a system for the Find-A-Doctor application. During this process, we also cross-referenced with other health insurance companies to gauge how different their experiences were. 

In crafting these questions, we focused mostly on the user experience and what a potential user has access to and is experience throughout the process of finding a doctor in various situations.

For our first assignment, we were instructed to craft five questions we came across during our research:

QUESTION ONE:  Post-Obama Care, does Premera still work with businesses and corporations as customers? Or solely with individuals? 

QUESTION TWO:  What client information can currently be accessed by a client’s online account? What client information could potentially be accessed moving forward? 

QUESTION THREE: What are your thoughts on premera.com + social media integration? 

QUESTION FOUR: What information does Premera receive from doctors, and what does a doctor’s online account with premera.com currently look like? In your opinion, do doctors seem interested in increasing their involvement? 

QUESTION FIVE: How exactly are service prices calculated? With knowledge of a customer’s network and plan, combined with price information from a doctor, shouldn’t costs be predetermined and thus readily available to the customer?

As well as five new learnings:

LEARNING ONE: Rating systems can be unreliable unless there is a large subset of data that can give an accurate representation. For example, if there are only 3 or 4 reviews, they tend to be either very positive or very negative, which is not helpful. Rating/Review systems need to have enough data supporting them to negate outliers.

LEARNING TWO: Wait times with a family physicians on average were three weeks and up to two months in certain cities. With the advent of Obama Care, many suspect this wait time to increase further since there will be more individuals with health care. 

LEARNING THREE: 3/5ths on users looking for providers online were "somewhat" or "very" important to their understanding and inquiry of providers. Important factors to locating the right provider, accepting health insurance (95%), a convenient office location (95%), years of experience (92%), being part of a trusted group (81%), being referred by word of mouth (85%), and referral from another physician (81%) were all more important to selecting a physician than an online rating.

LEARNING FOUR: Users are interested in knowing more about their doctors/costs/etc. so they can make more informed decisions. The reduction of time spent on finding the right doctors could also reduce the amount of visits and overall confusion with communication between insurance companies and providers. However, it can also affect how certain medical operations such as surgeries and other high risk procedures are handled or decided because users are more informed.

LEARNING FIVE: In 2011, an average of $703 was paid out of pocket for health care among people with some health care expenses. However, the median out-of-pocket amount was notably lower ($237). This means that there is a large deviation between the amount of out of pocket expense paid by a health care customer. Obviously health care plans depend on many factors including class and the type of plan available to a customer but there seems to be great variety in cost between individuals which may be a turnoff for some.

And, lastly, a problem + opportunity + hypothesis we hope to further explore:

PROBLEM: Bringing incentive to patients to rate doctors and their experiences with nurses, wait times, offices, etc. 

OPPORTUNITY: Introduce a system to reward customers for rating doctors on premera.com (i.e. earn points for each review and receive benefits when pre-determined milestones are reached). 

HYPOTHESIS: By introducing a reward system, customers will be more likely to rate and review their experiences with doctors on premera.com.

The main problem space that we would like to direct the most attention to is find an easy and usable way of connecting users with each other as well as their doctors and insurance representatives; we believe that utilizing some kind of social networking mechanism can improve how users learn about providers. 

There are some concerns, however, that include how effective this type of system will be since much of the subject matter is sensitive and may deter users from communicating with each other. We realize that protecting one's confidentiality is of great importance of users in this problem space. 

With this problem and hypothesis, we target users that are either new to Premera or have changed their plan in some fashion to warrant looking for a new doctor. We surmise that with contributing reviews from other Premera customers, users will be more informed with making a choice and thus reducing the likelihood of dissatisfaction.