Virgin Pulse Voice of the Customer Takeaways: Medica

This Summer, Virgin Pulse launched its first-ever Voice of the Customer series where each month, our employees have the invaluable opportunity to hear directly from our clients about what matters to them most and how they’re leveraging Virgin Pulse within their organizations. In July, we had the pleasure of hearing from Alice Sanders, MS, RN, PHN, Director of Health Strategy and Consultation at Medica.

Medica, based in Minneapolis, is a nonprofit health insurance provider that spans across 12 states with 300,000+ eligible commercial lives and since their recent strategic relationship with Dean Health Plan, over 1.5M members. Since becoming one of our most engaged and innovative clients in 2015, Medica has leveraged Virgin Pulse to work toward its mission to be the trusted health plan of choice for its customers, members, partners, and employees.

Each Voice of the Customer session is hosted by our Chief Revenue Officer, Andrew Reeves, who conducts an insightful Q&A with our clients to draw out insights, ideas, and inspiration to the entire Virgin Pulse employee community from around the world and now, we’d like to share that insight with the rest of you, too.

Check out our top takeaways from Alice below:

• Offer a wellness platform that engages members. Virgin Pulse's platform provides an improved interface, holistic content and programs, and a lot more engagement options than previous solutions. We have a broad range of members and they're all on a different path, journey, or spectrum with their health and wellness. Virgin Pulse offers an easy way to engage and find something that works for them—if it is step tracking, sleep, or journeys, there's a path for everyone.
• Ensure you have ways one can customize their program to meet their members’ needs. We appreciate the customization and flexibility of the program design. Some of our clients customize their programs with incentives that go above and beyond what we include with the program.
• Build rewards into your program: Consider adding HSA contributions or premium reductions off health plan costs and build different ways for employees to earn rewards.
• Integrate your other services and benefits into the platform. The portal gives our clients the option to integrate and build in specific services they offer and then reward their members for engaging in those programs.
• Embrace your account management team. We have a great relationship with Virgin Pulse. We've been with you since 2015, and we have an awesome account team who is not only a good partner to Medica, but they also meet with some of our larger strategic customers and they're a great partner to them as well. Their willingness and openness to help support those relationships and collaborate with us has been really helpful and has helped us, I believe, to maintain some of those strategic customers who are leveraging the Virgin Pulse platform for their customer experiences.
• For best results, Alice suggests other health plans to follow Virgin Pulse’s best practice recommendations. The advice we would give to others  considering offering Virgin Pulse or working with Virgin Pulse is to as much as possible follow Virgin Pulse’s standard approach and their best practice recommendations with reward design, capabilities, and features. We run into problems when we ask Virgin Pulse to do something that's not part of their standard approach, and it doesn't end up working as well as we would like. And having a product that works really well and doesn't create complaints is very important to Medica. So, I would say follow what Virgin Pulse recommends, stick with the standard approach, and your results will end up really well.

We’ll continue to share key takeaways from future Voice of the Customer sessions to help inspire the rest of our clients to grow their wellbeing programs, so don’t forget to check back next month for our next featured client.

What’s your favorite part of Virgin Pulse? Let us know in the comments below.