Data Science Can Empower Benefits Leaders Communicate Less and Yet Accomplish More

In many companies today, internal communications overload is a big problem. Internal communication teams including human resources teams are wary of sending out more emails or direct mail than necessary. They also know that most employees ignore internal communications because such communications are poorly written, poorly designed and not personalized. For critical communications such as benefits enrollment, many human resource departments use electronic mail, paper mail, and posters to ensure that the message gets across. Most employees have learned to ignore internal communications unless that message is repeated multiple times.

In this scenario, if a benefits leader wants to educate specific segments of people about health benefits that are relevant to them, there were limited tools available to them. My team at Castlight has taken significant steps to address this need among other things. My purpose here is not to promote the products we build. Instead, I want to talk a bit about how we are planning to use the lessons learned while building Castlight Action, our predictive analytics and personalized recommendations product,  to empower benefits leaders in all our customer organizations, make employees aware of their benefits, to enable employees become healthier and even help them save some money in the process.

Since we have data about the behavior of millions of users and billions of claims, we use data mining techniques such as cluster analysis to identify segments of people with similar attributes who behave the same way. We may not understand why certain segments of people with similar attributes behave the same way, but we know that they do. Then we identify the people with such attributes who are not behaving the same way and tell them they might want to consider such behavior.

The above paragraph is very abstract. So, let me share an example. From our data, we know that for some reason people in their twenties care a lot about dental health. In other words, people in their twenties get dental checkups every year. Once they reach their thirties their lives probably get busier with family and children and they do not get as many dental checkups. So, let us say they were a 1000 people in their twenties in a company with 10,000 people. 800 out of those 1000 people get dental checkups every year. So we wonder about why those 200 people in their twenties are not behaving like the others. Maybe they just joined the company. Maybe they don't know any good dentists near their home. Maybe they think it would be very expensive to go get a dental check up. We really  don't know why. However, we know that if we tell them about the dental benefits they have via their employer and enable them to find high quality, reasonably priced dentists near them, there is a very good chance that they will get their dental checkup done. This leads to benefits awareness, benefits satisfaction, better health, better productivity and in many cases some cost savings.

The interesting thing is that we can accomplish this by communicating to just those 200 people rather than communicating to the 800 people who already get their dental checkups and the 9000 people who are not in their twenties and don't care about dental health. I took a fairly simple example to explain how we reduce the need for mass communication about benefits and significantly increase personalized communications that engage employees and slowly but steadily change behavior, improve benefits satisfaction, make employees healthier, and even save some money for the employer and the employee. Most segments are not this simple to build or comprehend.

Building such an infrastructure and assembling a product, data science and communications team that can do this can cost employers tens of millions of dollars, even if they have a clear idea about how to do this.

Today, Castlight has several such segments and serve many employers in the US. Every month, we keep adding more segments that make personalized highly relevant and valuable recommendations to employees. Every piece of communication we send out makes one person a bit more knowledgeable about his or her benefits, has the chance to make him or her a bit healthier, makes him or her a bit more productive and saves him or her and their employer a little bit of money. We do this several million times every year. Knowing this is what motivates me to get up every day morning and go to work. If you are a physician, data scientist, product designer, content strategist, or a product manager and think this is fun to do, give me call. I am on LinkedIn.

The Innovator's Prescription by Clayton Christensen

When I joined Castlight Health about 10 months ago, I looked for a good book that provides a good overview of the problems facing American healthcare. While I heard about many specific problems, I wanted to understand the history of today's problems, the reasons those problems arose, the players who have a vested interest in solving those problems and the possible directions to solve those problems. My wife got me the book, The Innovator's prescription by Clayton Christensen, written in 2009. It gave me the required perspective. It answered questions such as who should we build healthcare solutions for and who has the motivation to change healthcare.

If you are new to healthcare technology and want to get a clear idea, this is a good book to read. I posted a video of Clay Christensen summarizing the book below. He summarizes ten years of research in 60 minutes.

Castlight Action was on Fox Business News

It is a product manager's dream to have his or her product covered by the Wall Street Journal and Fox Business News in the same month. I am living that dream this month.  Castlight Action sends personalized health care recommendations to employees at the right time so that they get better heath outcomes and better financial outcomes. Leading the team that designed and built Action and launching it for some of the largest employers in the world will rank among the top five highlights of my career building software products.

My colleague Kristin Torres Mowat, explains Action to the Fox Business team. You can see the video here.

Role Of a Clinical Product Manager In a Healthcare Technology Company.

When I joined Castlight Health in 2015 to build data-driven insights and recommendations products, I started managing clinicians who play a critical role in product development. Soon I realized that, while they play a critical role in product strategy and product development, there is no clearly documented definition of roles and responsibilities for a clinician in a healthcare technology company. So, I decided to spend some time researching it by talking with physicians and those who work with them and documenting it for my own understanding. Since this is an important role in a rapidly growing industry, I decided to share the knowledge openly for the benefit of physicians considering a full-time or part-time role in a healthcare technology company.

Motivation of physicians to join a healthcare technology product company: A physician joins a healthcare technology product company because he or she believes in the power of technology, combined with his or her expertise in medicine, to influence healthcare in a profound way compared to working in a hospital and serving a few people a year with their time.

Role of physicians in a technology product company: They play two main roles. Some play the role of a medical expert who endorses the products and services of the healthcare technology company. This role resides in the sales and marketing arm of a company. They may have titles such as Chief Medical Officer or Solutions Consultant. Some play the role of a medical expert inside a product team. Such experts are called Clinical Product Managers.

The assignment of a clinical product manager will vary depending on the company. However, I want to give you an idea of how it might look in a company such as Castlight, which is a good representation of a small healthcare management technology company. I believe that understanding the day to day responsibilities and the time spent on every work area will help set the right expectations and attract the right people to a healthcare technology company.

Main Assignments of a clinical product manager in Castlight: First, they work with data science teams to identify and assess opportunities to influence member behavior and validate concepts against real-world healthcare workflows. For example, they will determine if Diabetes is an area where technology-based interventions can lead to better health and financial outcomes. Second, they work with epidemiologists to segment the population, define their healthcare journey, determine their motivation and define calls to action. Third, they work with product managers to define behavior change goals and interventions to implement the calls to action.  Fourth, they work with content leads to write clinical content and review it for clinical accuracy. They will also work with user testing teams to define criteria for sensitivity testing. Finally, they will represent the product team in customer conversations before and after product sales. They will reach out to a larger community of physicians, contracted by the company, to seek specialized expertise when appropriate.

Skills and Development

Clinical product managers could go through content writing training and pragmatic product management training to fine-tune their product leadership and product operations skills.

Career Path
Clinical product managers will go on to become general managers of products in a healthcare technology product company.

If you are a physician who has practiced medicine for a few years and has experience building software products for the healthcare industry, consider joining us.  Together we can make a difference in the lives of over 6 million people working for over 200 employers served by Castlight. You can see the detailed job description here. You can also contact me via LinkedIn or contact my recruiting colleague. Shawn Brown. sbrown@castlighthealth.com 

Launching a data driven recommendations product is a bit like launching a rocket

At Castlight Health we recently launched our first data-driven recommendations product called Castlight Action. We launched it for our own employees first before launching it for customers. It has four modules. The first one is the identification and prediction engine that segments people, the second is the application for the benefits leaders to turn on campaigns, the third is the delivery of email and web-based recommendation content. The fourth is the module that tracks the engagement of members with recommendations.

These modules start to execute one after the other. Every module depends on the successful execution of the previous module. Every module has a product manager in-charge of it. I was watching the leader of every module take a deep breath and verify things when their modules go live. Nerve wracking, in a good way.

While we are operating in new territory, my plan is to make the process of desining and developing data driven products a lot more predictable than it is today. I hope to learn from others who have done it and learn by doing when I can.