Reopening Safely with Work.com

CG Adams: Hello everyone and welcome to the Payer Principle, a Salesforce healthcare podcast created exclusively for payers. I'm your host CG Adams. On the show, you'll hear insights from healthcare industry experts and trailblazer organizations on all things payer, such as trends, business challenges and the latest technological solutions. Today's episode focuses on how payer organizations can take a phased approach to reopen safely and keep employees and members safe and informed during the COVID- 19 pandemic with work. com. I'm joined today by DJ Stojsavljevic. DJ is currently the director of payer strategy for the healthcare and life sciences team at Salesforce and has over 15 years of combined technology and healthcare experience. DJ, welcome to the show. It's great to have you on today.

DJ Stojsavljevic: Thanks for having me CG.

CG Adams: DJ, in response to COVID- 19, Salesforce along with our partners launched work. com to help businesses and communities reopen. Tell us about work.com and what exactly it is.

DJ Stojsavljevic: Work. com include solutions ranging from contact tracing, to emergency response management, to employee wellness assessment and shift management. And that's there for accelerating private and public sector responses to the COVID 19 pandemic. I think for everyone, COVID 19 has caught the world by surprise, without a doubt. And technology has always been at the forefront of helping change people's lives. Salesforce realized the importance of this and is responded with work. com.

CG Adams: At the heart of work. com is a Command Center. Can you tell me about that?

DJ Stojsavljevic: In any type of catastrophe situation, you always have this Command Center or this main hub and Command Center is really what we focused on, and it's to drive all the readiness for employees, partners and members in three key areas that are going to meet those federal, state and local requirements. And those include the adherence to be able to develop and make sure that you're adhering to those policies. Also to make sure that you're able to plan for social distancing for when people do return or all those partners and all those members, how are they going to interact and make sure that social distancing's in place from space planning and then make sure that those employees procedures are put in place so they can return to work. Now, information can quickly be enacted because one core important areas, it's not only to be able to set this up, but we have to visualize this data. We have to take in those internal external sources directly and make those accessible to employees, partners and members.

CG Adams: Now that you've oriented us a little bit into exactly what work. com is, let's dive into what's happening with payers now in direct response to the pandemic. What are some of the unique challenges that payers are experiencing as they're working remotely during COVID- 19?

DJ Stojsavljevic: Well, when you look at a payer's kind of the ecosystem in their organization, they touch multiple different people in different ways. They touch their community, their members, employees and partners. And so you have to be able to communicate with all of them. One of the first things that they're looking for is identifying which departments and teams are going to return first. The other thing is to develop that communication strategy so that you have constant communication with those employees, those partners and the members are informed and up to date. Third item is reporting on employee health and regulatory and running the business. And we'll talk a little bit more as we go through this podcast a little bit more of how they're doing that exact and what we're hearing from them. Also, making sure that you have major enterprise health plans that are assessing those requirements in the early stage, by utilizing tools like Trailhead, so that you're collecting wellness assessment and making sure that people are completing those assessments and fully acknowledge that they understand them, because if they don't, then you may be at risk and you may have a considerable outbreak within your organization.

CG Adams: Tons of challenges that payers are experiencing brought on by the pandemic, keeping some of those that you just mentioned in mind, what exactly are payers having to consider when it comes to reopening?

DJ Stojsavljevic: Yeah, five major areas. First one is facility management. Second one is capacity planning. Third is shift scheduling. The fourth is to be able to do employee contact tracing. And then five is to have all of this managed in one area called Command Center.

CG Adams: Tell us a little bit more, let's start with facility management.

DJ Stojsavljevic: Facility management is really, how are you going to take the layout if it's local branches, if it's your home offices, what do you take as far as those multiple floors how everything is going to be spaced? How are you going to determine social distancing? And then how are you going to manage to be able to make sure everybody is going to be organized within those layouts of those floors and for those buildings? Capacity planning is to look at those floor plans and determine how many people can you fit and manage that high traffic areas? You can't have people moving around like we did before this new normal and so you really have to understand how that's going to look and make sure the capacity for those floors are determined. Shift scheduling is this is a really unique area, but it's a main focus is what are the most essential workers that have to come back first? And this is really comes into that phased approach. And not only scheduling them, but how are you going to make sure when they do arrive on site, they have to make sure to thermal temperature check, which badges are activated, which are not, how is HR going to engage during this process as they start to come back on the schedule? And then make sure that managers are following up on that. The fourth one employee contact tracing, I think we're hearing a lot about contact tracing and we're hearing about how are we going to track this? How are we going to make sure we acknowledge if something does happen how do we react to that? Making sure that badges are disabled, only the healthiest people are going to be able to come on board. How are we going to take care of those people that do have the symptoms? And how are we going to have the action plan adjusted for that? And then from an asset management perspective, need to organize and structure so payers are trying to make sure they're up to date and compliant with any regulations that are coming in, not only from a state local area perspective, but also from the federal area. All of these have to be together so that you have the latest information to be able to manage that. And obviously when we bring all that together, that's where everything comes into Command Center.

CG Adams: Understanding the challenges that payers are facing at the moment and some of those top of mind considerations, I want to double click into exactly how work. com can actually help them navigate this difficult time. Can you tell us about some of the key features of work. com?

DJ Stojsavljevic: Yeah. Let me talk about two key areas I think that the payers have top to mind on top of the five that we talked about, but contact tracing and emergency response management. Contact tracing, obviously the spread of COVID, we've seen this recently with the spikes in the amount of positives. And so you have to consider the importance of work.com is not only is COVID but it's also in preparation for now that this is the new normal, how are we going to constantly track this moving forward in any type of pandemic like this? These diseases, these type of pandemics, they can impact the health of the payer community and contact tracing really is developed to allow payers through guided interview templates, to collect data from individuals who are infected or potentially exposed through transmission from either through friends or through family members. Now that data can be used to be able to create those visual maps of contacts and locations and to be able to monitor potential interactions and outbreaks. This is especially important as people are being brought back in the phased approach and to be able to respond very quickly because a single platform is critical to identify, understand and respond. And this leads to our next topic, which is emergency response because you can't have one without the other. When you do have this outbreak, you have this exposure, what do we do? Three key elements to have emergency response management module is to identify quickly those emergencies, deliver emergency care and you are going to have to allocate the resources quickly to meet those emergency that requires payers and providers to identify it, to establish a triage and evaluate those members and patients and to make sure that they have ongoing engagement and monitoring. Because you can't just say," Hey, you've got it," and then you just move them along. We have to monitor this. Because there'll be a time that they no longer have COVID, but maybe some of the family members that they've come into new contact with, it's kind of a revolving door. You have to be very careful. You have to have the operations, you have to have rules and you have to deploy the resources.

CG Adams: And you make such a salient point there that these two things go hand in hand, contact tracing and emergency response management. Now that we're a little familiar with the key features of work. com, what's the recommended path forward for how and when businesses should reopen?

DJ Stojsavljevic: Yeah. CG, it's really a down to a three- phased approach is what we've learned. Number one is to be able to stabilize. Number two is to reopen and number three is to grow. And to stabilize, you have to mitigate your short term risks and stabilize operations. You have to execute a robust in crisis response to protect and run the business during lockdown. That's that crisis response center. What we were kind of talking about is how do you stabilize now? How do we work to put a plan together with what we have today? They're working out there remotely, all of that's important to kind of stabilize. When we consider reopening, we have to plan and orchestrate how to bring them back. And that's that Command Center piece. You have to kind of put that orchestration together. And by putting in place that planning, the logistics communications, you can then resume operations while at the same time, making sure you're protecting employees. And now finally in grow, you can accelerate the change to grow in the next normal. By accelerating through digital transformation to become faster and more relevant to customers than before the crisis. I think what's huge about this is the lack of communication now. We've heard it across multiple different topics and conversations as COVID has happened and a lot of it is down to communication. And so when you can grow by accelerating that digital transformation through a lot of communication, that's going to be a key to understanding how are you going to be able to get past this?

CG Adams: Understanding that phased approach is going to be really critical for payers and their employees. What about members? Where do members fall within all of this? How can payer organizations apply a member- centric approach in mindset to reopening safely?

DJ Stojsavljevic: Yeah, CG, I'm going to take this a little bit different into a different path. And I think you've heard a lot about the Command Center, developing the plans and executing those plans for return to work for employees. But I think members are such an important part of that community to payers. How do you communicate is a very, very strict focus right now. We hear it across many of the payers. And I think when you're on a platform, why did work. com go on to a Salesforce platform? Because it offers so many different ways to communicate, to follow a member's journey. One area I wanted to kind of discuss about is marketing has taken a completely different view on this and different path. We talk about a member journey, you also have to communicate what are the new COVID- 19 plan benefit updates? When you now have indicated that members, what's going to happen with the payer? How are they reopening? How are you going to interact with their employees? What's going to be the new normal? If your members have come down with COVID- 19, you have to now communicate to them quickly about what their plan benefit updates are. How are they going to stay healthy? You have to have the ability to do that. Then you also have to be able to indicate if they have the symptoms, we need to get them to a provider into that location that's for testing. To be able to communicate that way. The platform really allows you to extend beyond just work. com, but that flexibility to market and have constant communication is a key component. You have to make sure that every channel of communication is available to members, SMS text, email, brokers and of course social media. Because this is so critical that they understand not only what treatment opportunities are available to them under benefits, but where can they go to make sure that they can get healthy and that they have the right information?

CG Adams: DJ, thank you so much for joining us today on the Payer Principle podcast and for all of your insights.

DJ Stojsavljevic: Thank you so much for having me, CG. This is a great topic and the timing couldn't be more perfect.

CG Adams: Listeners, if you want to learn more about how your organization can reopen safely, visit work. com. I'm your host CG Adams. Thank you for listening.