Situation: In planning the roll-out of a new health plan, CenterLight needed to understand what new features to include in the product design.

Challenge: Most consumers don’t have a firm grasp of what their health insurance provides them, or of what the benefits actually mean. A complicating factor was that CenterLight serves primarily frail elderly patients who are typically not fluent English-speakers.

Response: We commissioned qualitative in depth interviews with, among others, patients and their families (in English, Russian, Spanish and Mandarin) to learn how much they knew about their health plans, and what new services would be appealing.

Result: The most important finding: most patients were unaware that CenterLight was their health care provider. This underlined the urgent need for a dramatically new client relationship management and communication strategy.

Research design and interviews: Hawk Partners; strategy, sample design and question guide, Neil Gluckin, VP of Marketing