Our offices in Morris Plains, New Jersey, and St. Louis, Missouri, are homes to The Lab by Evernorth, where high tech meets high touch to drive forward our mission of improving the health and vitality of everyone we serve by relentlessly challenging ourselves to partner and innovate to bring meaningful new solutions to solve health care’s biggest challenges.
The Lab brings together colleagues, clients, providers, and partners to go deep on the challenges our patients and clients face and to create new capabilities and solutions. We provide multiple opportunities for clients and other visitors to engage with our team of innovation experts, and with highly relevant data, enabling them to better understand the challenges in their plans and potential solutions either in development or available today. These capabilities make these spaces the perfect environment to pilot, perfect, and launch improvements to patient care.
“The Evernorth Lab is helping us solve some of health care’s biggest challenges, which is the core mission for these spaces,” said Viju Paul, vice president of market analytics at Evernorth. “These are physical spaces for innovation, ideation and collaboration.”
Here are some of the ways the Lab is helping solve challenges for our clients and improve the health and vitality of the patients and communities we serve.
Bringing different skillsets together to look at health care challenges through new lenses
“When we bring a client into the Lab, we run their data through our proprietary data and insights models to help host personalized conversations about what known, and sometimes unknown, health care challenges they might be facing,” Paul said. “That client data, paired with insight into what's happening across the health care landscape today, gives our clients an in-depth view into their unique pain points and challenges.”
Evernorth clients find value in connecting with our intelligence teams face to face, diving into market and plan data, and deriving new insights. “Together, we can analyze data and explore new opportunities on how to extract value and improve outcomes,” said Marie Vidaic, senior director of clinical product analytics at Evernorth. “Clients can see their data come to life in the Lab and gain a better understanding of what’s taking place within their employee populations, making them better positioned to make informed decisions for their members and businesses. Together, we are able to achieve greater results.”
Piloting digital dashboards that meet client needs
Evernorth’s proprietary social determinants index (SDI) is an example of a solution that we piloted and iterated with clients in the Lab to ensure it met their needs to better understand barriers to good care and good health, and the sub-populations inside their plan in need of the most support.
The SDI looks at populations whose overall health status and utilization of care are negatively impacted by non-clinical social determinants of health (SDOH) and identifies where additional resources may need to be deployed to reduce barriers to optimal health. We use the index to identify populations within a client’s workforce who are at increased risk for poor health and suboptimal care, based on where they live, and who might benefit from more personalized solutions to achieve better health and affordability.
Our clients and account teams can leverage this proprietary capability by applying it to their own populations, to better understand the social and community health barriers working against their members. This level of insight helps our clients target at-risk pockets of members through relevant, targeted interventions.
Helping employers navigate COVID-19
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the team created a suite of analytics tools designed to address deferred care during lockdowns. We helped one client identify high-risk employees through a mix of clinical data and publicly sourced information, enabling proactive outreach to ensure they were getting the therapy they needed – even throughout lockdowns.
As COVID cases began to drop and offices reopened, clients could use the analytics suite to identify locations where employees were at higher risk of severe illness. They used that data to determine which of their sites to open first.
"Health care is complex, but in the Lab we share insights in a consumable manner helping to make them actionable,” Vidaic said. “Our clients get to experience our dedication and passion firsthand and see that together, we can make a meaningful difference for our patients.”