Health Risk Engagement Strategies: Driving Change Before It's Too Late
By Scott Conard MD and Brian Uhlig
For executives managing health plans, one of the biggest challenges is engaging individuals who are in the early stages of disease risk progression but feel perfectly fine. These individuals, often unaware of the looming consequences, present a significant opportunity—and a unique challenge—to healthcare strategies. Once someone becomes symptomatic, behavior change is much easier; they’re desperate to feel better. However, by then, it’s often too late to reverse the damage. Instead of cheaply and effectively addressing the issue, we’re left managing a chronic condition for the foreseeable future.
The key question: How do we engage people early, before symptoms appear, and inspire them to take meaningful action?
This is where cutting-edge health risk engagement strategies, driven by predictive data and real-time activation technology, become a game-changer. Our algorithms utilized by the MyPHA team is your solution to this problem.
Shifting the Paradigm: From Retrospective Cost Analysis to Proactive Risk Engagement
The status quo in healthcare analytics relies on retrospective cost-based reporting. Most organizations are equipped with tools that answer questions like:
- How much did diabetes cost us last year?
- What are our highest-cost conditions?
These data points are useful for understanding the past but do little to impact the future. They focus on individuals who are already in the high-cost, high-risk category—individuals whose health trajectory has already caused irreparable harm.
What’s missing from this equation is predictive engagement—the ability to identify the individuals who are trending toward risk before they become symptomatic and to intervene effectively in real time.
Consider this: 70% of today’s high-cost individuals won’t be the same people next year. If you’re only looking at historical data, you’re blind to the emerging risks within your population.
Why Predictive Engagement Matters
Let’s look at the CFO perspective:
"I’ve already got reports. I know I have 384 diabetics and 264 people with hypertension. I have programs in place for them. Why do I need anything more?”
Here’s why: Traditional reports don’t tell you who your next high-cost individuals will be, nor do they provide actionable insights about how to prevent them from becoming costly. They miss the nuances of health risk drivers—factors like comorbidities, social determinants of health, geographic influences, and behavioral patterns—that determine whether an individual can avoid a serious medical event.
Predictive engagement goes beyond labels and costs. It examines the whole person—integrating data about:
- Chronic and acute conditions.
- Economic and social resources.
- Workplace tools and wellness programs available to them.
- Behavioral trends and opportunities for timely interventions.
This holistic approach enables organizations to answer the most critical question: How can we prevent costly and emotionally taxing events before they occur?
Engagement, Activation, and Support: The Pillars of Early Intervention
Effective early intervention requires a three-pronged approach:
- Engagement: Identify individuals who are silently at risk and help them understand the stakes. This requires leveraging predictive data to highlight their unique vulnerabilities—before symptoms appear.
- Activation: Inspire behavior change by connecting the risk to personal outcomes they care about. It’s not enough to say, “You’re at risk for diabetes.” Instead, communicate, “If we take action now, we can help you avoid painful complications and maintain your quality of life.”
- Support: Provide the tools, resources, and follow-up necessary for sustained behavior change. This includes personalized care pathways, access to health coaches, digital tools, and community support systems.
The Financial Case for Early Engagement
For employers, early intervention is not just a health imperative; it’s a financial one.
- Avoiding a single preventable medical event can save tens of thousands of dollars.
- Employees who avoid disease progression are more productive, have lower absenteeism, and cost less in disability claims.
But this requires a shift from reacting to past costs to proactively managing future risks. By investing in predictive analytics and engagement technology, organizations can reduce costs while improving outcomes for individuals.
Conclusion: The Future of Health Risk Management
The old approach—focusing on retrospective cost and disease management—is no longer enough. Health risk engagement strategies must evolve to focus on real-time insights, whole-person care, and proactive prevention.
The stakes are high, both for individual lives and corporate budgets. But with the right strategies, tools, and commitment, we can make a measurable difference—shifting the focus from managing disease to building health and resilience.
As executives, the question isn’t, “Why should I care about your data?” It’s, “How can I afford not to?”
By embracing proactive engagement, activation, and support, you can ensure your organization is leading the way in creating healthier, more productive populations. That’s a future worth investing in.