Consumer Engagement Reference Architecture (CERA) for Health Plans

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Consumer Engagement Reference Architecture (CERA) for Health Plans


Health plans are under unprecedented pressure to improve the health and quality outcomes of members and mitigate the spiraling costs of health insurance that's draining the resources of employers and raising the ranks of the uninsured to record levels. Personal choices and health behaviors are fundamental causes for spiraling medical costs. To improve the situation consumers must be engaged in their health. However there are many barriers to engaging consumers in their health. Consumers do not want to be force fed information they're not interested in, nor do they want to visit special centers for information or education. The solution to getting and keeping consumers engaged in their health is by “going where they go”. The best way to do this is to reach consumers where they spend time -- on their home media centers, mobile devices, online portals, and instant messengers.



There are three key technology strategies that can enable health plans to overcome these barriers to engaging consumers in their health. Technologies must be designed and deployed to advocate personal health by scaling and extending labor-intense health management processes, they must adapt health management interfaces to the digital lifestyles and preferences of consumers, and they must activate members to continually improve their health behaviors and self-manage their conditions.

Acknowledgements
Authors would like to thank Sam Robinson, Keith Cox, Eddie Amos, Liron Shaked from Microsoft without whose support this work would have not have been realized. Also, we would like express our thanks to Jon Tobey for his contribution, Anurag Rahul, Karthik Gurumurthy, Prateet Sinha, Ramraj Mothilal, and Subir Talukder of InfoSys for their hard work in releasing CERA.


For more info -http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb964538.aspx