Greg Matthews
Director of Consumer Innovation, Humana
All for one—one for all
Greg Matthews, director of consumer innovation at Humana, Inc., admits to a weakness for Alexandre Dumas novels. The romantic adventures of The Three Musketeers, he says, offer light entertainment, non-stop action, a bit of history and a touch of elegance.
He may be onto something. Swashbuckling individuals who think on their feet and do what’s right provide an apt model for the type of leaders who will transform the health care industry in the coming years.
As the national health care reform movement kicks into high gear, making innovation an industry imperative, Matthews is working to build consumer perception of Humana as the health company of the future. His strategy is to leave the premium-claims side of health insurance to the financial whizzes and focus instead on the purest side of the business. “The future,” he says, “is going to be in creating health.”
In this notoriously traditional industry, the innovation team at Humana has augmented its social media platform to spearhead several programs that get people walking, biking, calorie counting, dancing—and while they’re at it—treating the environment respectfully. So far, the experiment seems to be paying dividends, even for Matthews. Since he started with Humana, he has lost 20 pounds, and he became a runner.
Matthews stays super-engaged with the online Humana community and other health-conscious social-media types by blogging about his activities on the company’s “Crumple It Up” web site and reporting his interval training on Twitter. He is becoming a human expression of the transformation at Humana. A former human resources executive, his relatively new role in social media has connected him to a growing community outside the company. At the same time, the face of Humana is changing, and this is all to the good.
“We want to form new relationships with people,” Matthews says, “to change perceptions about who we are. Social media is the antithesis of the normal corporate structure. It is anti-governance, anti-top-down control. Authenticity is important; relationships are really important.”
Part of this new initiative is Humana’s Freewheelin’ bike-sharing program in Louisville, Kentucky, where the company employs almost 9,000 people. Humana’s employees tool around the city on shared bicycles while charting miles covered, calories burned and carbon saved. The company has created a joint venture company called Sensei, Inc., a mobile wellness enterprise that delivers daily nutrition and exercise tips via cell phone and PC. Humana is connecting to seniors with an annual Senior Games competition and some lower-key activities like casual dancing at the Humana Guidance Center in Las Vegas. Seniors come in to the Center with health coverage questions and spend most of their visit fox-trotting to a Dance Town video game.
To attract Generation Z, the Humana team has linked its “Operation Planet Savers” (OPS) online game—a competition that gets kids out in the back yard on weekly “missions”—with the new Disney movie “G-FORCE.” The company has also placed what Matthews calls “completely goofy” videos on YouTube that invite viewers click onto the Humana web site and take part in a “Healthy Games” idea competition.
“A billion videos are watched on YouTube everyday, so why wouldn’t we go there?” he asks. “The number of people who have clicked through to our contest is twenty times higher than a normal banner ad.”
Matthews says that Humana is trying to create new business models around health, but that they haven’t “cracked the nut yet.” Eventually, the company hopes to build “doctors’ networks” with physicians who contract with Humana. Matthews says this is the “less sexy” aspect of the company’s social media platform, but one that is crucial.
“I’m dying to get to a place where we engage with doctors,” he says. “We find ourselves in a competitive space with them, but what if we enfold that contracting process into a more collaborative interaction? We can do it more openly, to allow us to co-create the contracting process. We haven’t moved into this space yet, but we see an opportunity.”
Whether Humana can leverage social connections to improve health outcomes remains to be seen, Matthews says. But the mood of the company itself has been extremely hopeful about the possibility of creating health.
“People at Humana really see themselves as a part of something that has a noble purpose and not something that is just a job,” Matthews says. He and his colleagues are working to build an authentic community of care, an idea that reflects the highest purposes of social media, not to mention the Musketeer motto, “all for one—one for all.”
