Asaf Kleinbort, CEO, Medorion, On Behavioral Intelligence Software for Health Insurers

Medorion, developer of Behavioral Intelligence software as a service (SaaS) solutions for health insurers, recently announced that it’s expanding its AI-powered platform into additional health plan-related focus areas beyond the company’s current Behavioral Persuasion software, including a comprehensive member experience solution, risk adjustment and care management.

DocWire News spoke with Asaf Kleinbort, Co-Founder and CEO of Medorion, to discuss his company’s innovative software platform and how it can benefit the healthcare system.

DocWire News: Can you tell us about yourself and your company, Medorion?

Asaf Kleinbort: I’m Asaf Kleinbort, I’m a CEO and one of the founders of Medorion. What we do at Medorion, we build software that help healthcare organizations understand why people behave the way to do, and it provides them with tools to use this understandings in order to impact members’ behavior at scale. Eventually we believe that our software can optimize performance in any area that involves human behavior. That’s the basics.

How big a problem is member engagement for health insurers? 

Well, I think that’s one of the biggest problems, if not the biggest one. When you look at modern insurance companies, most of them take risk on their members. And sometimes we forget that most of the members are healthy. So one of the challenges of healthcare organizations and specifically health plans, is to keep the healthy people healthy, or to keep them in the same stage. And to do that, you have to impact their behavior. You have to make sure that people schedule colonoscopies, mammographies, vaccinate themselves or the kids, come visit the physician once a year and so on and so forth. And all of this objectives eventually achieved through member engagement. So member engagement is one of the key capabilities, key goals for model health plans today.

How can Medorion’s behavior-based SaaS platform address the problem of low health insurer engagement? 

Basically I can divide it to two benefits of value that we focus on. First of all, is what I started with. We have a software that analyzing data. Data that existed health plans, and allow the plan to understand why do people behave the way they do. For example, if someone avoids colonoscopy, is it because it’s concerned by the procedure or is it because he’s concerned by the cost or maybe he doesn’t even know that there is a thing called colorectal cancer and that he’s susceptible to it. And this piece, the why, the EBR, the electronic behavioral record, is the core of our solution. On top of that, we think it’s not enough. It’s good, but it’s not enough. On top of that, we have the SaaS, the software as a service solution that allows plans to do it themselves, to take these insights and to translate them into actual communications, into actual engagement events that eventually drive behavioral change, or drive members action.

And so we provide both sides of the equation, both the understanding, the analytics, the AI that bring this knowledge of people’s behavior. And on top of that, simple tools that allows you with few clicks without the need of hiring PhDs and data scientists and so on, allows you to build very complex engagement strategies that are based on these insights that I mentioned.

Do you have any data that backs the impact of your software?

We work with a hand full of US health plans. We only work with US health plans, by the way, that’s currently our only market. And one of them is a big Medicare advantage plan in the Midwest. And they were able to use our software, both to improve quality measure or specifically to improve medication on selected measures. They used it on population that is taking preventative drugs, like startings and similar. And with the insights of the software and the campaign that the software generated, they were able to improve by four points, medication adherence for 2020.

The way I see it, and know what we get from interaction with the market is, in today’s world we would probably be scared starting to take almost any plan today. And we see a lot of new blood in the plans. Many people who come from consumer facing organizations, and they are looking for tools that they know from the other companies, like a product manager at Amazon has amazing capabilities of understanding the audience or product manager at Netflix. And similarly, the care managers of today’s world, they want the same capabilities. They want the ability to understand not only the clinical side of the members, but also the way their members make decisions. And so we believe in, I think we already see it in the market, that SaaS solutions, solutions that allow people in the healthcare organization to do it themselves, are going to boom in the next few years, and are going to have a huge impact on this market, similarly to what we’ve seen in other markets, in e-commerce market or finance and so on.

How big an impact will SaaS companies have on the future of healthcare?

I think we covered the basic things. I think the ability to map and programmatically understand the behavioral patterns of people, can significantly impact healthcare. Similarly, to the revolution that population health tools did a decade ago, or social determinants of health that came into the market a few years ago. I think that behavioral understanding can do similar change and significantly improve healthcare outcomes.