• by Wendy Lurrie , Columnist, August 11, 2015

Every business is a healthcare business. Where there is health, there is healthcare. And where there is healthcare there are concerns. Those concerns manifest in many ways — financial, emotional, attitudinal, behavioral, social and strategic, both at the enterprise and individual levels.

Healthcare’s impact on employers and employees is only growing more intense. Anyone responsible for the budget or for the administration of benefits is already acutely aware of the saliency of healthcare. But the rippling impact of healthcare concerns is broader and deeper, and can define an organization  for good or bad.

There are so many ways in which business and healthcare crisscross, and every enterprise has to address at least some of these dynamics. Here are 10 of the most prominent intersections to consider:

1. The high cost of providing healthcare to employees, and the increasing necessity to shift some of those costs to employees.

2. Identifying ways to improve wellness at work to lower costs and ideally boost productivity.

3. Deciding whether or not to move away from employer-provided healthcare entirely. The alternative: providing subsidies to allow employees to access insurance on one of the exchanges.

4. Regulatory changes happening at the local, state and federal levels.

5. News about mergers and acquisitions in the industry that may cause concern to those in a plan. (See Aetna buying Humana for one current example.)

6. Misinformation about healthcare costs and coverage.

7. Rampant confusion about the language of healthcare and the wide variety of delivery models. (“Do we offer an ACO, PPO, ECO or HMO?”)

8. Baby boomers who are concerned not only about their own health but also about aging parents and children.

9. Millennials who by large margins prefer to get their healthcare at retail and their info by mobile.

10. Endless and often contradictory news reports about a wide range of healthcare issues.

So what should companies do? For starters, you need to begin to address healthcare as a matter beyond finance and administration. If you want to be one of the best companies to work for, how you engage employees in healthcare matters. If you care about recruiting and retaining top talent, healthcare matters. If you want to become (or remain) a high-performing competitive enterprise, healthcare matters. If your business is part of the sharing/freelance economy, healthcare matters. And, of course, if you want to better manage costs, healthcare matters.

Healthcare is intimate, personal, emotional and scary. The system is opaque, and the alphabet soup of acronyms is forbidding. The processes are byzantine. Everything about healthcare is, in a word, fraught. And organizations that recognize and respond to this reality not only with information but also with empathy, authenticity and genuine humanity have the best chance of success.

This isn’t a function delegated to an already overburdened human resources department. We need meaningful engagement and effective communication about healthcare. It needs to be created and executed in ways that recognize the realities of the role of healthcare in employees’ lives.

If we attack this problem as we would an external marketing opportunity, the path is clear: understand the audience, map the journey, identify the insights and the decision dynamics, and build plans that deliver the right information to the right audience in the right way. Then test, learn, measure and optimize. It’s not magic, it’s marketing. And what better way to harness a marketing department to leverage its expertise than to apply it to real needs within its own organizations?

The need is real and it’s universal. Because regardless of what is said in the annual report, value proposition, go-to-market plan or mission statement, every business is in the healthcare business. It’s now up to us all to embrace this fact and take it on as decision makers, as marketers and as humans.