Better lives

Leading with digital to simplify care for consumers

Sydney project manager demonstrating the app to colleagues

Our ambition is to catalyze the industry toward whole-person health – personalized, proactive and preventive. And we are doing this through a digital-first mindset, which includes investing in innovations both inside and outside our walls.

Rajeev Ronanki, Anthem’s Chief Digital Officer, Anthem

To significantly reduce cost and complexity in the healthcare industry – challenges affecting customers and consumers alike – we know we need exponential change. This is both an opportunity and a responsibility that Anthem takes seriously.

“I think of innovation as a three-legged stool,” says Mariya Filipova, Anthem’s Vice President of Innovation. “First, the internal work – how we operationalize our business and reimagine the consumer experience. Second, the external relationships – how we bring the best ideas forward. And finally, there’s the third and most important piece: infusing ‘expect more’ innovation into our culture and thinking. This is what we’re building at Anthem.”

Reimagining our business

After years of developing and using digital solutions within the context of our existing business model, Anthem continues its move toward being a digital-first company. This requires more than just creating apps – it requires taking a platform-centric approach to creating integrated solutions for consumers, employers, care providers, brokers, associates and the broader community.

Kim proudly showing the Sydney app

Sydney, Anthem’s digital engagement platform for consumers, is the realization of our digital mindset. Launched in October of 2019, Sydney offers individuals a personalized one-stop shop for all things healthcare – with services that may include having a family personal health record, accessing health coaches and nutrition advice, helping consumers with a plan to manage chronic conditions, or find doctors through a personalized matching system powered by machine learning.

After its successful launch, the Sydney app has had over 625,000 downloads to date.

For care providers, we have the same end-to-end vision: With integrated digital tools that support high-quality care management, doctors have access to metrics and insights that enable them to better manage population health and deliver value-based care.

Building an ecosystem of innovation

Anthem is using an ecosystem approach to collaborate across industries, bringing together a diverse set of partners with the common goal of creating a better consumer experience.

In 2019, for example, Anthem helped form the Health Utility Network (HUN), a first-of-its-kind consortium through which companies can build, share and deploy solutions to simplify healthcare. HUN members – an unprecedented collection of health benefits companies, banks, and technology players – are pooling resources and creating best practices that advance interoperability and data sharing using blockchain technology. This work has the potential to improve many aspects of healthcare services and delivery, such as a credentialing process for care providers and the coordination of benefits for consumers with more than one health plan.

Anthem has also established a growing number of relationships with universities and research centers, like Stanford University and Northwestern University, to cultivate the best talent and capabilities. For instance, Anthem became the initial founding member of AI for Health, a corporate affiliates program within the Stanford University Department of Computer Science that aims to help consumers understand their healthcare options and make informed decisions. Anthem will collaborate with Stanford to fund research on how artificial intelligence algorithms and systems can advance healthcare administration, healthcare delivery, and wellness. Advancements in patient literacy, patient engagement, and healthcare transparency have been identified as the first areas to be addressed through this relationship.

A culture of innovation underpins all of this work. “We believe innovation is a mindset through which we all become powerful agents of digital transformation,” explains Mariya. “It allows us to expect and deliver more across our company and the healthcare system – to simplify care, and improve the lives of the people we’re privileged to serve.”