UnitedHealthcare experience illustrates how payers can enable patient engagement.

Patient engagement is crucial to better outcomes and a high-performing health system, but efforts to support it often focus narrowly on the role of physicians and other care providers. Such efforts miss payers' unique capabilities to help patients achieve better health. Using the experience of UnitedHealthcare, a large national payer, this article demonstrates how health plans can analyze and present information to both patients and providers to help close gaps in care; share detailed quality and cost information to inform patients' choice of providers; and offer treatment decision support and value-based benefit designs to help guide choices of diagnostic tests and therapies. As an employer, UnitedHealth Group has used these strategies along with an "earn-back" program that provides positive financial incentives through reduced premiums to employees who adopt healthful habits. UnitedHealth's experience provides lessons for other payers and for Medicare and Medicaid, which have had minimal involvement with demand-side strategies and could benefit from efforts to promote activated beneficiaries.

Health information technology and health system redesign--the Quality Chasm revisited.

UnitedHealth Group constructed the Diabetes Prevention and Control Alliance (DPCA) in a manner consistent with the recommendations for health system redesign outlined in the Institute of Medicine's Crossing the Quality Chasm. This evidence-based, multidisciplinary education and intervention program is enabled by a state-of-the-art health information technology (HIT) infrastructure. DPCA coordinates and connects a variety of interventions through HIT, including community-based services offered by YMCAs and local pharmacists. Our initial experience in operating DPCA gives us confidence that large-scale prevention and disease control management programs make economic sense, are worthy of front-end investment, and can achieve cost-effective results. Others who want to use our model will benefit from policymakers' efforts to prioritize future versions of transaction and coding standards that meet the needs of preventive healthcare as much as they do acute and chronic care.