Good morning. It’s been a tough year for Humana, the health-insurance giant that primarily serves seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans. On Nov. 5, Humana reported a drop in net income to $1.62 a share, from $3.98 a share the year prior, and lowered its full-year earnings guidance. But CEO Jim Rechtin assumed the role last year with a mission to transform Humana’s relationship with customers. “We are not where we want to be, and we’ve been very public,” he told me. “We feel very good about the trajectory that we’re on for next year.”
Here are some of his priorities, excerpted from our conversation:
Culture Change: “I don’t want to pretend that there aren’t obstacles, but they are obstacles of history, the cultural biases that we bring to every conversation. We recently rolled out a new portal for the annual enrollment process. What we have never done before is say: ‘Let’s rapidly prototype one in 30 days, trial it with a bunch of real consumers, get feedback, modify the next 30 days, get feedback again and so on.’ We would have typically come up with a six-month plan to build something, with no input from the people who are going to use it and then find out that we didn’t build it quite right.”
Customer Experience: “We are streamlining the prior authorization process to make it less cumbersome, both for providers and consumers … We predominantly serve seniors. They’re absolutely digitally engaged. Sometimes we get caught up in the bias that they’re not. This year we rolled out an event called the Cognitive Games, [games] like Bejeweled and Wordle. In the first week, we engaged a few hundred thousand people, so we knew we’d built something that they wanted. We’re out where consumers are, building a relationship with them. We’re not managing a payment transaction in the shadows.”
Leveraging AI: “Let me give you examples. We are rolling out ambient listening technology that takes the administrative burden of being a doctor off our doctors and allows them to spend more time with the patient. We have a new tool that we just rolled out for our brokers and sales agents that we refer to as Agent Assist that allows them to streamline a very complicated sales process.”
For the full Q&A, click here.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
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CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams and Claire Zillman.
