Today, everything you desire and more is only a tap away. Whether it’s a bottle of red wine after a long day or front-row tickets to an upcoming sporting event, our society is dominated by digital technology and its promises to connect, simplify, or enhance the way we live.
Yet, with the advent of digital technology, health outcomes have not all taken the same leap forward.
Since 2009, America’s life expectancy has only improved from 78.5 to 78.6 years, while the average life-expectancy amongst other developed countries, such as Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and Britain, increased from 81.2 to 82.3 years. The difference is almost an additional 4 years of life.
To add insult to injury, the average American is spending $5,299 more on healthcare per year than other developed countries, according to a 2019 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report. So why hasn’t the average American’s health improved?
Some argue countries like Japan or Switzerland are more homogenous or have better infrastructure which makes it easier to address their citizens’ needs. Though those factors are important, the root cause goes deeper than all of that.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other health organizations, the real answer is health literacy or health education.
Digital technology enables individuals to gain access to more options and information. But it is hard to know what the right choices are. How do you interpret your health benefits? What if you don’t want to do it? This is where health literacy can complement technology.
Health literary or health education is defined as the “ability to obtain, read, understand, and use healthcare information in order to make appropriate health decisions and follow instructions for treatment.”
Simply said, does the average American know the difference between a premium and a deductible? Are you confident filling out medical forms by yourself? Can you understand the medical terminology that the provider uses?
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 88% of Americans are not proficient in health literacy skills (i.e. couldn’t answer those questions confidently), which is estimated to cost between $106 and $238 billion in unnecessary healthcare expenditures per year.
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This is why venture funds have invested over $870 million in patient engagement organizations to help patients navigate and understand the healthcare system in 2018 according to Startup Health Insights. And in Q2 of 2019 alone, $223 million was invested in U.S. patient empowerment organizations.
As a result, the solutions to our greatest health issues will need to be more than just digital; they also have to be behavioral and cultural, which makes health literacy an essential partner to their success.
The best opportunity to improve health outcomes for all is to use digital technology as a medium to promote health literacy rather than a tool to provide us with more options that we don’t comprehend. For example, in the early 2010s, the Tips from Former Smokers Campaign effectively used social media to improve the delivery of information from healthcare professionals to the general public about the effects of smoking. This campaign led to 1.6 million smokers seeking help and over 100,000 smokers quitting.
Another example is hospital systems using a mixture of in-person and online gatherings for their Diabetes Prevention Programs to support and empower people with diabetes to make better lifestyle decisions. This program led to a 58% decrease in risk for developing Type II diabetes.
At Anthem, we are currently partnering with Goodwill of Eastern Kentucky to launch a job-readiness program with services that integrate consumer health literacy with financial and digital literacy. Anthem also recently announced a digital-first health experience on Alexa devices called Anthem Skill, where members can learn more about their health plans and benefits, hence, improving health literary for members through new technologies and mediums.
If digital technology can help make achieving health literacy as easy as a tap on a screen, maybe it can help make improving health outcomes in America a bit easier too.
Timothy Lee is a portfolio manager at Anthem.01