RamaOnHealthcare March 2, 2023
A single enterprise platform enabling all patients to get the care they need and healthcare organizations to thrive.
Today, RamaOnHealthcare talks with Ben Albert about the Upfront Patient Engagement Platform, Personalization, and Psychographic Segmentation.
Ben Albert, CEO and Co-Founder of Upfront Healthcare
ROH: Tell us about your background; what led you to start Upfront, and how would you describe what Upfront does?
Ben: I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Upfront Healthcare, based in Chicago. Upfront is on a mission to guide every patient to the care they need. Our company offers the leading enterprise patient engagement platform that blends behavioral and consumer science to personalize each patient’s experience to make it simple for them to get the care they need, which helps healthcare organizations grow, drives patient retention, and improves health outcomes.
Upfront is on a mission to guide every patient to the care they need.
I’m a longtime healthcare entrepreneur with a passion for building companies that offer both social benefit and economic sustainability. Healthcare is in natural alignment with this, so for the last 25 years, I’ve focused on really helping every patient get the care they need. I started Upfront Healthcare following an earlier success in founding a company called Care Team Connect. This stemmed from a family experience in which my grandfather suffered a couple of strokes, and the care around him wasn’t necessarily the tightest. He was in and out of the emergency room while I was on the other side of the country at the time. Watching the care coordination ultimately fail him led me to think about how we can better coordinate care in the community. Care Team Connect was a care management platform for population health. That company was then acquired by The Advisory Board.
The experience made it evident to me that not only do patients like my grandfather need care navigation, every patient should also have the benefit of personalized engagement. It’s not just a population health story, it’s an “every patient” story. Truly enabling every patient to get the care they need is what led me to launch Upfront Healthcare. Upfront blends the shared risk population health side with the fee-for-service environment to enable every patient to get the care they need.
ROH: The term “patient engagement” is used a lot in healthcare and is a focus for many tech companies. What does patient engagement mean to you, and how does Upfront approach patient engagement differently?
Ben: Patient engagement isn’t simply a process of delivering digital communication. Anyone can send a text message or email. Engagement goes beyond technology. Patients are people with unique motivations, priorities, and needs. “One size fits all” or “one size fits many” messaging or steerage on the same channels is not equitable or effective across a population of people.
“One size fits all” or “one size fits many” messaging or steerage on the same channels is not equitable or effective across a population of people.
To us at Upfront, patient engagement is how you help every patient and enable them with the information they need to make the right decisions regarding their care. Truly personalizing the digital or interpersonal interaction through messaging, channel mix, and frequency for each patient individually maximizes behavior activation. We ask ourselves, “How do we best communicate with this individual? What language do we use? What imagery do we use? What modality or combination of channels do we utilize to help this person understand that the care they need is critical to them?
…”How do we best communicate with this individual?
Once we engage the patient on their terms, Upfront routes them to the appropriate channel of care in a seamless and frictionless manner, making it easy to activate desired behaviors — whether it’s a digital, retail, or physician visit channel of care delivery. We help patients optimize their access and we help our clients utilize their services as efficiently as possible to meet all patients where they are.
ROH: Let’s talk a bit more about personalization. Why is it so important, and how does Upfront operationalize it?
Ben: Targeting a health condition or including a patient’s name in an email greeting is not personalization. Patients want to be understood, respected, and feel like the provider is tailoring care just for them. Deep patient insights, behavioral science, and consumer analytics determine the when, where, and how of patient engagement. Upfront has integrated a proprietary and proven psychographic model developed by healthcare consumer experts from Procter & Gamble to harness people’s motivations, attitudes, personalities, and communication preferences. Along with tailored, health-literate, equitable content, human-centered design, and an omnichannel approach, Upfront informs, activates, and sustains positive health behaviors. It is a process that starts with data and ends with activation.
Moreover, the campaign mentality in healthcare is misaligned. Piecemeal communications focusing on given issues, targeting massive populations of people – many of whom may not need the service being marketed – are ineffective, inconsistent, and frustrating to patients. A continuous, proactive engagement strategy, beyond typical EMR and CRM capabilities, is needed as personalization must be automated, hands-free, and continuous to deliver the results healthcare organizations seek.
Patients deserve a superior experience, and healthcare organizations can realize big returns from delivering this level of care. Furthermore, deep personalization engages and activates patients 40% better, on average. Engagement as an EMR “box to check” feature lacks the ability to personalize the patient digital experience because these systems’ core products are very different. Settling for “one size fits all” communications is a disservice to both patients and providers, which is what any mission-driven CIO should consider when seeking to enable patients and achieve organizational goals.
…deep personalization engages and activates patients 40% better….
ROH: How else is Upfront different from other patient engagement platforms?
Ben: Upfront makes it seamless for a patient. A patient receives a mix of omnichannel communications; for example, a text message, email, or automated phone call that are very personalized to them. These communications use content that is consistent with the patient’s personalization profile and that we know compels them to take action. These communications link patients to a responsibly designed webpage that we call a microsite. It is personalized and embedded with the access option that’s available to them for the care they need. The page has imagery that speaks to them, content that’s health literate, and enables them to act. It’s HIPAA compliant. We’re HITRUST certified, so it checks all the boxes and removes the friction of going to a portal or downloading an app, or remembering a complex password. It provides a very clean and eloquent way to the care that they need.
On top of that, we’re way more than technology. For example, the Bartosch Patient Activation Institute is Upfront’s applied research center, dedicated to solving the most complex healthcare challenges by combining research, data, and design with human insights to achieve best-in-class patient activation outcomes. So, we have a team of people at Upfront who understand design, literacy, and communication. We provide all those services as part of our platform to ensure the right communication is being delivered, using the right language, the right imagery, and we’re enabling patients to take action. We believe the patient is the most underutilized resource in healthcare! If you better enable the patient, ultimately, they’ll make the decision that’s in their best interest and complete the care they need.
We believe the patient is the most underutilized resource in healthcare!
The level of depth we can go to understand how to engage someone and then get them access to the care they need in the most efficient, effective, and timely way is truly amazing. Bringing that all together is a big differentiator for us and enables us to be successful.
ROH: What market segments do you serve? What challenges – business and/or clinical – are you helping them solve?
Ben: We typically serve large hospitals and health systems, physician groups, urgent care operators, and even the payer/providers who manage risk and employ clinicians providing care. Our solutions drive smart client growth, retention, and better health outcomes. This includes the range of patient acquisition, return visits, patient loyalty, and helping patients book and keep appointments for necessary care. As a result, this closes gaps in care, converts referrals, promotes adherence to care and enrollment in specialized services, and may reactivate patients who have gone a while since last being seen.
ROH: What is your vision for the future of Upfront and patient engagement?
Ben: It starts with a simple statement: We’re going to help every patient get the care that they need. That’s what we focus on as an organization. That’s the lens the company looks through to help us grow. We strive to help people be successful in their care and our clients to be effective and efficient in how they’re providing that care. Last Fall, we acquired PatientBond, the leader in healthcare psychographic segmentation. We’re building organic advancements within the platform to further our enterprise capabilities across a health system or large provider organization. We’ve also been exploring payers and life sciences with early success, so these provide additional avenues of expansion. This ultimately converges into Upfront’s ability to provide a single stream of communication to a patient that is thoughtful, personalized, and intentional to help that patient get the care they need. We are that single enterprise platform to support a patient across a complex healthcare system and provide care through multiple modalities.
We’re going to help every patient get the care that they need.
About Ben Albert
Ben Albert is the CEO and co-founder at Upfront. An established entrepreneur, Ben has spent more than 25 years building and leading healthcare organizations that disrupt the industry status quo to successfully activate patients, while improving clinical, financial, and operational outcomes for providers.
Prior to launching Upfront, he was the founder and CEO of Care Team Connect, a leading care management platform for providers. The company was acquired by The Advisory Board Company in 2013, where Ben led Population Health. He went on to serve as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Operating Partner within the Strategic Investments Division of Cambia Health Solutions, advising portfolio companies and evaluating new investment opportunities on the group’s behalf.
Additionally, Ben held various executive-level positions at PatientKeeper, Inc. and Data Harbor, Inc., before both companies were acquired.
Ben holds an MBA in Entrepreneurship from the University of Illinois Chicago, and a bachelor’s degree from Western Michigan University. He lives in Evanston, IL, with his wife, two daughters, and two dogs. When not working, Ben can be found outside thinking about work.360