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Prime Therapeutics, Eagan, MN

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Prime Therapeutics, Eagan, MN
Company Description: Prime Therapeutics LLC (Prime) helps people get the medicine they need to feel better and live well. Prime manages pharmacy benefits for health plans, employers, and government programs including Medicare and Medicaid. The company processes claims and delivers medicine to more than 25 million members, offering clinical services for people with complex medical conditions.
Nomination Category: Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best New Product or Service of the Year - Consumer Services

Nomination Title: PrimeHelps.com – Simplifying Health Plan Decisions to Three Steps

Describe for the judges the nominated product or service, including its features, functions, benefits, and performance to date (up to 525 words). Include in this section the date since the beginning of July last year on which the product or service was introduced to the marketplace: TEXT REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION

Health care is changing rapidly and dramatically. There are over 40 million uninsured individuals who have entered (as of 1/1/14) or who are entering the health care marketplace. The majority of that population has never had health insurance. If you think about the existing health care consumer, you are talking about someone who is employed and receives their benefit through their employer. Think about it: every fall, your employer holds a benefits fair or a town hall where your human resources professionals explain s all the changes to your health plan, your vision plan, and your 401k options. The 40 million uninsured individuals who are or have recently entered the marketplace have never had the benefit of a human resource professional explaining to them how health care works. They don't have someone down the hall they can go ask questions of. And now, they have to make a very big decision about what kind of insurance is best for them.

Primehelps.com, launched in September 2013, is a service that Prime Therapeutics (Prime) built in order to help make that decision as simple as possible. On healthcare.gov, it takes a consumer 41 steps to get to the best plan for them. On primehelps.com, we created an incredibly easy user experience that gets a health insurance shopper to the best plan for them in three steps. We ensure that we make the decision very simple for people by asking them where they live and what medicines they take. Then, we have a proprietary algorithm that helps choose the best plan for them based on cost, convenience, and coverage. We make it incredibly intuitive and very simple to compare different plans.

The entire site was built for the shopper, by the shopper. We used a team of designers, representing different personas in order to ensure that every task any of the persona types would try to accomplish could be done in three steps or less. The site doesn’t look or feel like a health care site. It is visually appealing, available in Spanish and English (which is a rarity in the health care space!) and is full of vibrant colors, content, and video.

Our core usability principles are that everything is written in plain language, no jargon and at a fifth grade level. The language of health care is complex and confusing. Research shows that many Americans think that the health care industry purposefully made their language more complex in order to hide things from the consumer. We wanted to ensure that the entire site was easy to understand. We even created a helpful glossary in order to make it easier for people to understand all the words that the media throws around. Did you know that 87 percent of Americans think a provider is actually the insurer? Insurance companies use that term to reference a doctor. Talk about confusion.

The site is also completely built on a mobile enabled platform. We don’t shrink the content, we resize.

Primehelps.com is one of kind. It is easy, simple, understandable, and beautiful. Words you don’t often hear used in reference to a service offering from the health insurance sector.

Upload a collection of supporting files and web addresses to our server to provide more background information to the judges. You may upload any number of attachments and URLs through the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above. (Do NOT list your URLs below.)

 

Provide a brief biography of the person or persons who lead the team that developed the nominated new product or service (up to 125 words):

As chief customer experience officer at Prime Therapeutics (Prime), Ingrid C. Lindberg is responsible for developing and overseeing the implementation of the enterprise customer experience strategy, which addresses all matters related to how Prime engages and serves its customers. Her role within Prime is the first of its kind within the pharmacy benefit management industry and has been created to ensure Prime’s customers have the best pharmacy experience possible and that the voice of the customer is a driver within the decision making processes at Prime. Prior to joining Prime, Lindberg was the chief experience officer at Cigna where she was recognized for exemplary customer strategy development and received multiple awards for customer experience excellence.