Whether it is to prevent disease, improve quality of life, or cope with the long-term challenges of chronic diseases, a scientific and effective health management plan is particularly important. This article will delve into the core concepts of health management and analyze how to maintain and improve health through scientific methods and personalized programs.
1. Understanding of health
Health is 1 and the rest are 0, there is no previous 1, and no more 0 is meaningless.
No one will say that it doesn’t matter, how many people burn incense and worship Buddha to pray for peace and health. But health is not the only pursuit of life, maintaining healthy living habits is like the process of saving money, no one wants to save money for the whole life without spending money to enjoy life. Health is an asset, the key is to spend less than you save (occasionally unhealthy is not a big problem), and how to spend money. Recoverable, non-sustainable, and cost-effective consumption health in exchange for other things we want, such as comfort, food, money, reputation, power, etc., is a true portrayal of our ordinary life.
2. Health management
2.1 What is health management?
Health management in a broad sense: maintain and improve people’s health and reduce the probability of illness.
What does a product manager need to do?
In the process of a product from scratch, it is not easy to do a good job in the role of product manager, in addition to the well-known writing requirements, writing requirements, writing requirements, there are many things to do. The product manager is not what you think, but will only ask you for trouble, make a request:
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2.2 How to manage your health?
2.1.1 Health management needs to be scientific
Maintaining and improving health needs to be guaranteed by science, and science is the cornerstone of health management effectiveness. The product built by the plan that comes up with a random pat on the head is likely to be used by the user but does not become healthier in the end, and the user pays a huge price but has no practical effect, and this kind of product is destined to not survive in the end.
The World Health Organization found that for personal health and longevity, lifestyle determines 60%, environmental factors determine 17%, biological factors (such as genetics) determine 15%, and medical and health determines 8%.
Two personal work experiences focus on lifestyle, so let’s focus on the impact of lifestyle on health.
Lifestyles that affect health include diet, alcohol consumption, smoking, exercise, psychological stress, and sleep, 30% of which are determined by diet. Health management must start from these aspects.
How to make users eat healthier？ Scientific diet planThe core points are just a few points:
Special groups need to control and avoid specific nutrients, such as diabetes concerned about carbohydrates, various metabolic diseases concerned about the content of trace elements and amino acids in food, such as phenylalaninemia (a user’s child suffered from phenylalaninemia when he was working at Mint Health before, and he needed to pay attention to the content of phenylalanine in food), abnormal copper ion metabolism and other diseases.
The difficulty of implementing the diet plan is that it requires a lot of education, and it is difficult to track whether the user has followed the plan after the education. You can’t just provide a tool like Mint Health and leave the rest to the user. This is just a problem replaced with another problem, how to let users record their diet every day? It must also be recorded accurately and in a timely manner.
How to make users move regularly?
150 minutes of exercise per week. Eliminate some bad exercise methods, pay attention to wrong exercise habits, and the remaining difficulty lies in persistence. Fortunately, exercise itself can produce endorphins, which can make people feel better after exercise, giving people more reasons and motivation to persevere. Exercise data is collected through the combination of software and hardware to facilitate health management.
How can I help users improve their sleep quality? How to get users to quit smoking and drinking? I have no personal experience, no experience to share, but these problems are tricky to solve.
2.1.2 Personalization – teaching according to aptitude
Personalized health management plan: Use targeted scientific plans to implement in a way that is easy for users to understand and adhere to, and ultimately achieve the user’s health goals. Personalization is reflected in 2 points:
- Individuals have different levels of understanding and acceptance of things, and different users need different methods and degrees of propaganda. Simple understanding, you have to make your plan understandable. At the same time, different users have different starting points and step lengths, and the plan must be gradual according to individual conditions to improve user participation and completion as much as possible.
- The program needs to be personalized: Individual risk division needs to be carried out, such as risk classification from biological factors (genetics, family medical history, age), behavioral habits, and different risk levels need to be controlled to different degrees. Scientific plans need to be targeted, need to have a full understanding of individual conditions, and everyone’s health management plan focuses differently, such as a person who exercises regularly but has poor eating habits, health management should focus more on diet rather than exercise. For example, for some older people, the requirements of health management can be appropriately relaxed. For example, for high-risk groups, some necessary health screenings need to be done regularly, while the frequency of low-risk groups can be lower.
3. Commercialization
3.1 Is health management a pseudo-need?
Just ask people, do you need health care? I think the vast majority of people need to take care of their health and want to stay healthy.
It’s like you ask: do you need money? Everyone needs it, health management is like investing to make money, you have to pay first to reap the rewards. Most people ignore giving and want to make money.
If you tell users that they need to exercise 2 hours a week (valuable time that could have been used to lie down, play games, and swipe their phones), eat as light as possible, eat less big fish and meat, drink as little milk tea as possible, not stay up late, not smoke and drink, etc., think about it, not many people need health management, even free products and services are unwilling.
Personal opinion: For healthy people, comprehensive health management is a weak need.
However, healthy people have no intention of planting willows in some subdivisions. The pursuit of thinness by healthy people (girls like to lose weight), the pursuit of toned figures by boys, and the addiction to dopamine and endorphins after exercise have unexpectedly reaped some of the effects of health management.
The pursuit of health by non-healthy bodies cannot be questioned, and the supply exceeds the demand. Otherwise, there would be no problem of difficult medical treatment, and the hospital would not be overcrowded. The key is whether the product actually helps individuals improve their health.
3.2 Health management with perceptible effects
From the perspective of products, why do users choose a product? Because the product has enough user value for users. If the product can become a commodity, then the product must have enough user value for users to make users willing to make transactions (pay) with you.
In the field of health management, the effectiveness of a product is reflected in the functional value of the product, that is, whether it can improve the health status of users. When a product has no real functional value, even if there are ways to fool users into using it or even pay for it in the short term. If it cannot be established for a long time, it is equivalent to you not having a product that is really valuable to users, but you hope that users will always be fools and pay for your products.
Just imagine, it is difficult to persuade a healthy person to follow a scientific plan for health management, and the user has persisted for a long time. How to prove the effect of the product? What is it measured with? If the effect cannot be proven, why should users spend so much effort on self-management according to the plan?
- For a healthy body, it is a healthy state before and after use, and there is no difference in functional value. But it can provide some emotional value and make users more happy during use.
- For patients with disease, long-term adherence to scientific health management plans can improve and improve health status, which can be perceived in theory, such as laboratory indicators from abnormal to normal, improvement of sleep quality, improvement of immunity, etc.
There is a time mismatch between the behavior and results of health management, so users need to perceive the value of the product in the health management process, otherwise many people will give up halfway over time. We can start with emotional value and health incentives, treat users’ behavior as accumulating money, and exchange accumulated health behaviors for some non-monetizable but beneficial services and goods and spiritual rewards. material rewards can be exchanged for free physical examinations, free insurance, medical green passes, etc.
Many people may say, why do you have to prove that the product actually works? I only provide health management tools, do not guarantee actual results, and do not pay attention to whether users can understand and adhere to implementation, just when users need me, I provide stable tools, just like mint provides weight loss tools.
Personal opinion:When there is no optimal solution stage, tools have room to survive, and there are many products of this kind of tool, and they are often of little value. When there is an optimal solution for weight loss in the market, tools that cannot guarantee actual results do not have much living space and are difficult to make profits.
Emphasis: Users can only exchange accumulated health behaviors for some non-monetizable but health-beneficial services and goods.
Case: Ping An RUN is a product, users can get prizes full of cash value by completing weekly target tasks, and the user task completion is very high and the activity is also very high. Many users will sell their prizes to monetize them, and cheat in order to complete tasks to get more prizes (rocker plus steps). As a result, Ping An spends billions of dollars every year to raise a large group of wool users, which is a big injustice.
3.3 Chronic disease management may be the best breakthrough point
Picture introduction:In “Innovator’s Prescription”, the author divides chronic diseases from two perspectives: “behavior-dependent” and “technology-dependent”.
Many diseases do not need to be managed, can be cured quickly, or there is no cure at present, and has little to do with lifestyle and behavioral habits. Some diseases cannot be cured, and lifestyle habits and behavioral habits are very important for the control of diseases.
When commercializing, it is necessary to select diseases that require health management:
- User perception: Patients can feel the pain and harm of the disease every day, the cost of education is relatively low, and patients will find solutions on their own. User problems can be perceived, and users themselves feel that they have problems and want to improve and alleviate them.
- Chronic diseases with good behavioral intervention effects, that is, behavior-dependent diseases: For example, chronic diseases with good effects of dietary intervention (nutritional intervention) are theoretically and scientifically guaranteed to have good results through dietary and nutritional interventions. The product effect has a scientific basis.
- There is already a scientific management plan for chronic diseases.
- Chronic disease population with a large enough population base: determines the ceiling of future product scale, market competition, and profit model.
When working at Mint Health, I was responsible for chronic disease management products for patients with type 2 diabetes, diabetes is a typical incurable (a small number of people heal themselves after a long period of management, most people need to control blood sugar all the time), uncontrolled harm will cause a lot of diseases, behavioral habits are very important to the control of diseases, there is a scientific management plan “5 carriages”, the number of patients is also large enough, theoretically there is an opportunity, but it ended hastily at the beginning, and the actual effect of chronic disease management has not been really verified.
3.4 Who pays
Now we have a scientifically effective and perceptible health management product, and it takes a lot of effort and money to develop this product. Who will pay for it? Under normal circumstances, whoever benefits pays. Medical insurance funds, commercial insurance, and individuals can all benefit from health management, relatively speaking, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies will be damaged from health management, and the probability and frequency of going to the hospital and purchasing drugs will decrease.
The medical insurance fund pays
The state is willing to pay for effective health management,Theoretical expected path: increase investment in health management, improve the health level of the whole people, reduce the occurrence of diseases, and reduce the cost of medical treatment.
The premise of payment must be sufficient data to prove the input-output ratio of health management. The increase in costs and the reduction in medical expenses are not synchronized, and what is the real input-output ratio?
The essence of medical insurance health management investment is “Fighting the risk of uncertainty with deterministic costs”, not only to use funds efficiently and accurately (who to spend money to reduce medical insurance costs, must not be flooded), but also to closely coordinate the entire medical system and social system. Will it lead to: health management funds→ excessive medical treatment + demand release→ medical insurance fund bottoming. This is a very complex problem, involving the whole body, even if the state wants to do it, it is a partial pilot to see whether the effect is expanded in the decision-making.
The role of the state in health management does not have to be implemented personally. The basic elements of health management can be provided, which are carried out by enterprises. For example, the unified management of individual scattered medical data is authorized to individuals and enterprises to facilitate health management and evaluate the effect of health management, which can only be done by the state.
Business insurance pays
Commercial insurance is a behemoth of health management and the country is different, and the difficulty coefficient is also different. Many insurance companies are trying to provide health management services and products for policy customers, with the intention of reducing the probability of disease through health management, so as to achieve a virtuous circle of reducing claims and increasing profits, but the effect is minimal.
The key is: the rational allocation of resources for customers at different risks, known as the Rule of 28.
Here’s why:
- Limited resources: Health management services (such as health assessment, chronic disease management, health intervention, exclusive doctor consultation, preventive screening, etc.) will inevitably incur costs (manpower, technology, project costs). Insurers cannot provide the same depth of service to all customers without limitation.
- Uneven risk distribution: The health risks and future claims probabilities of insurance customers are not evenly distributed. A small number of customers (probably close to 20%) account for the majority of future claims (probably close to 80%) due to factors such as age, pre-existing diseases, lifestyle, etc.
- Differences in intervention effects: For low-risk healthy people, even if health management services are provided, the probability of future claims and the amount of claims will be relatively small (“health ceiling” effect). For high-risk groups, effective health interventions (such as controlling blood pressure and blood sugar, improving lifestyle habits, and strengthening medication adherence) can significantly reduce the incidence of complications and hospitalizations, thereby directly and significantly reducing the occurrence of high claims.
- Goal orientation: One of the core business objectives of health management services is:Reduce loss ratios and improve underwriting margins。 Equal distribution of resources does not maximize this goal.
Differentiated resource allocation based on risk stratificationThis requires insurance companies to be strongData analysis capabilities, accurate risk assessment models, hierarchical service design capabilities, and continuous effectiveness evaluation systems。 Only by using valuable resources “good steel on the cutting edge” can we maximize the dual value of health management to the health of insurance companies and customers.
The effect of health management cannot be seen in a short period of time, and insurance companies need to be unswerving and continuously optimize for a long time. If the product can really make an effect, the insurance company is still willing to pay for it.
Individual payment
Everyone is the greatest responsible person for their own life, and the same is true for health. Under the premise that the product is effective, are users willing to pay? Individuals should be most responsible for their own health and pay for their health, but at present, the awareness of software payment in China is not very high, and it is difficult for a large number of users to pay for it in a short period of time, and it needs to be cultivated for a long time.
Businesses pay
It is adopted by many foreign companies (especially in Europe and the United States).Self-Insured Health Plans (SIHP)In this model, the company will control medical costs and improve the health level of employees through health management services. The situation in China is different, mainly from insurance companies to buy individual insurance or group insurance (a few companies), and the company does not have much motivation to spend money on employee health management.
Final words
Health management and chronic disease management are long and involve a wide range of areas. The success of commercialization must overcome the three major gaps of “weak willingness to pay, difficult service closed-loop (slow effect output, making people feel that the effect cannot be seen), and data fragmentation (multi-dimensional data is needed to manage and evaluate the effect, but the data is scattered on various islands”.
I hope that a company that can truly manage people’s health can grow into this track as soon as possible.
