We asked Dr. William Fleming, President of Clinical and Pharmacy Solutions at Humana, how the company’s approach to customer-centricity leads to better outcomes for its more than 16 million members.

Q: What makes the healthcare system so complex?

A: The healthcare system is complex for a variety of reasons. One of them is the transactional nature of the system itself—from primary care to hospitals, to sub-specialists, to labs, to the pharmacy. It’s built around a series of transactions that aren’t meant to improve a patient’s experience. And it’s based around a payment model that incentivizes volume of care, not a unified, integrated healthcare experience that I believe most consumers richly desire.

Q: Why is a focus on the customer so important in the healthcare industry today?

A: When I think about the rise of e-commerce, the rise of digital, the rise of social media, consumers expect more out of healthcare. It’s an opportunity to take healthcare from being transactional in nature to an integrated experience that blurs the lines between insurance and care. The companies that can figure that out will win more than their fair share of business.

Q: How does Humana innovate to better serve its members?

A: Humana has a rich history of innovation. From nursing homes to where we are today, there’s been fundamental change and innovation at every step that’s driven from the ground up, from the local market back, from that customer view. And I think that innovation has allowed us to become this deeper health company focused on delivering the right experiences to consumers that will get them to their best health, but also take the wastage out of the system.

Q: What role does technology play?

A: Technology plays an important, enabling role in our success in delivering and financing care. If I had to put one word on it, I would use “interoperability.” It’s how the system comes together to share data between all the participants in the delivery of care, whether it’s your doctor, the lab, the pharmacy, the home health nurse or the behavioral health person.

We’ve been working with Salesforce for a number of years around our move to the cloud. This journey to the cloud is so important because it’s fundamentally changing how we’re able to more richly share data with physicians and other participants.

We are doing our best to realize this notion of a 360-degree view of a member, so that anyone who’s engaging on a consumer’s behalf knows where that consumer is in the healthcare system that they’re participating in. With a 360-degree view, physicians can make better decisions.

Q: What does customer-centricity mean to Humana?

A: For Humana, customer-centricity is something that is becoming a movement. What we want to do is bring forward human care in how we serve the consumer every single day. We have a member journey that we’ve been working on that we call Rachel. We want Rachel’s healthcare experience to feel integrated, and be backed by a product-driven mindset that she will appreciate. And we want Rachel’s healthcare experience to be enabled by technology that’s interoperable for all the actors in the system. It’s that interoperability, bringing together that 360-degree view, that allows us to address real-world problems for consumers that will get them to their best health outcomes.

Learn more about customer-centricity from Salesforce.

Five Questions on Customer-Centricity with Humana