How payers can regain consumer trust via personalized care

Consumers want health plan personalization

According to Trzcinski, building a personalized health plan experience is going to be essential for health plans going forward.

"We know that personalized experiences are better at keeping folks engaged, getting them to actually take action on the changes that we need them to take in terms of their healthcare and getting to better outcomes and driving low-cost utilization, especially as we see rising costs continuing to escalate," Trzcinski explained.

Put simply, personalization means member engagement, and that can mean better clinical outcomes and lower costs for payers.

But it's not just payers that understand the value of personalized health plans. Consumers want them, too.

According to a yet-to-be-released Forrester report, 67% of consumers are interested in shopping for and piecing together their own insurance plans instead of having their employers do it. Among Gen Z members, who are among the youngest, healthiest and lowest cost for payers, 62% would want a more customized plan and are willing to pay more for it.

But those personalized plans don't come for free -- they rely on consumer data.

Building trust in consumer data sharing

Without consumer data, there is no personalization. But consumers don't usually share their data with entities they don't trust. Indeed, consumers who highly trust their payers are 5.5 times more likely to share their data than those with low levels of trust, according to Forrester's "The Trust Foundation Is Fractured For US Health Insurers, 2025" report.

This creates a conundrum for health plans looking to fortify their business strategies.

Trzcinski advised payers to emphasize the security protocols in place for the data they do already get from consumers, even if it's limited right now.

"As we think about the experience and the data that we're collecting, be more transparent with folks about what data you are collecting," she suggested. "Why are you collecting it? How are you going to use that data to co-create value with your customer?"

There's also a wealth of consumer data that has nothing to do with clinical metrics that members might be more willing to share. What are your members' health goals? Why did they choose this particular health plan? What features have stood out to them? Getting answers to these questions can help payers determine better member engagement strategies.

Building consumer loyalty through frictionless branding

There's also the question of brand differentiation. Is your health plan a brand that consumers like working with? Or is the health plan experience filled with friction and frustration?

Trzcinski said those factors can be huge drivers of trust.

"What's really interesting about emotion and trust is that the two go hand in hand," she remarked. "Emotion is an amplifier for both good and for bad."

According to the "Foundation Is Fractured" report, folks with low trust in their payers are 12 times more likely to feel frustrated with their health plan and 14 times more likely to say they feel disappointed. When consumers experience negative emotions with their insurer, they become less likely to choose that plan or brand again.

Payers need to drive consumer trust by creating more delightful, seamless member experiences again, especially around their data. In addition to strict safeguards, Trzcinski said payers need to have more seamless and interoperable data. For example, rather than asking members to repeatedly provide the same information at each encounter, payers need to work on systems that can serve up a member's profile and ask the member to only correct information that is no longer up to date.

Focusing on transparent communication, easily accessible information about how payers use data and clearly outlining the measures taken to safeguard the information will likewise be key, Trzcinski noted.

These are only small steps, but they are essential as payers work to unlock the consumer data necessary to drive more granular, personalized experiences that can ultimately move the needle further.

"How do we forge this relationship between a member and a health insurer? Because we have to," Trzcinski urged. "There's a growing number of options and a movement toward different approaches to health insurance."

"Health insurance plans have to figure out how to bolster this relationship right between their members and their brand," she concluded. "Otherwise, they will see increased attrition as we continue to see employers pushing more folks down new pathways or even folks going without insurance because they can't afford it."

Sara Heath has reported news related to patient engagement and health equity since 2015.