Cambia Health Solutions Transforming the Health Care Landscape Through Innovation

Cambia Health Solutions got its start 93 years ago when a dozen logging families came up with an innovative idea to deal with the hazards of their work and the associated health risks. Each worker contributed to a community fund so medical costs were shared by everyone, reducing the potential burden to any individual or family. Since then, the way that people viewed health care has changed.

Over time, the system grew more bureaucratic, complex, and expensive. Our communities grew, but that created distance from one another. Health care had reached a breaking point.

Just as those twelve families innovated to change the face of health care, Cambia holds innovation as one of its core values today, making it part of the company’s DNA. “Being the Chief Value Officer for Innovation allows for a different kind of conversation. When someone says I don’t have time to innovate, I ask them, does that mean you only have time for teamwork on Tuesday or ethics on Friday? When you think about innovation as a value it really transforms the way you prioritize your thinking,” said Mohan Nair, Chief Innovation Officer for Cambia Health Solutions.

“When I first took on the Chief Innovation Officer role, people would often throw their ideas at me in the elevator, thinking they had done their duty,” said Nair. “We had to become a lightning rod of innovation, attracting and engaging employees to join us in ideation and design.” Innovation Force (IF), the internal team Nair leads, was born.

“We started with some basic principles. For instance, we aren’t about ideas, we’re about people with ideas, our igniters,” said Nair. That focus on people, rather than just ideas, led to the realization that if these igniters didn’t know about each other, then their true collective passion couldn’t be utilized.

At first, Cambia’s innovation team used a “homegrown technology,” which meant meeting with every individual who shared an idea on the company SharePoint site. This strategy was difficult to scale, lacked a way to organize around a topic, and was missing a clear pathway for moving ideas forward. “The process wasn’t transparent. We needed to expose and grow great ideas, but there was still an obvious gap of igniters being unaware of one another.” Nair and his team turned to Spigit for help in 2012. Cambia picked Spigit as it was most easily aligned with its company philosophy. “We wanted to ensure employees that they worked somewhere that was caused-based rather than profit-centric, that Cambia was focused, not only on innovating, but establishing a culture of innovation with a clear direction for where that innovation would lead us.” This revitalized set of principles and person focus would take Cambia to the next level of ingenuity.

One example of how this new energy created results was during an “app-a-thon challenge” presented to the employee base during the company’s Innovation Week. Solutions were sought for 8-10 different topics, all of which centered around “the big problems in healthcare”. From there, the Spigit platform enabled IF to apply its proprietary i5 process to grow the igniters and their ideas from concept to incubation. The teams grew their ideas with participation from the company. The top teams were brought in to pitch their concepts to the CEO and the executive team.

“Some ideas advanced toward implementation, some didn’t,” said Nair. “However, the top igniters were selected to assist in key initiatives. One app-a-thon participant was recruited by IF to build a solution that we’re currently using with the U.S. military,” said Nair. Another app-a-thon team broadened their idea and helped to research key elements of Cambia’s senior market strategy. “When you value people more than their ideas, you find many ways to creatively deploy the great hearts and minds we have at Cambia,” said Nair. These were clear successes, and an exciting cultural evolution was underway at Cambia.

IF built upon these successes by continuing to refine its own proprietary i5 innovation process, providing employees with training in design thinking, and launching divisional challenges to help leaders innovate in their everyday business. Within a year, the team has over 7% of employees actively engaging in growing ideas and 84% of employees agreeing that Cambia encourages innovation. As a result, Cambia exceeded its board-level innovation engagement targets. Cambia has also seen real return on investment from its innovation efforts. A recent challenge yielded $4 million in cost savings associated with process changes. Another igniter idea was turned into a new sales engagement tool, called Reform for Me, that has supported over $60 million in sales and renewals and is now being made available by IF to other health plans to help them work with employers on understanding reform impacts.

IF has adopted a coaching mentality to innovation. “To be seen as a credible team to share your idea with, it is critical that you actually show you can take an idea to market,” said Nair. When the IF team first formed, one of its first efforts was to launch Sprig Health, now a company within Cambia’s portfolio. IF also routinely “boosts” divisions that need help. For instance, when Medicare needed help improving its STARS ratings, the IF team was sought out for its ability to rapidly solve company challenges. IF was able to help the Medicare team reach the next STAR level which represented approximately $50M that can be directed to help lower Medicare costs and has a direct impact on members’ pocket books.

“By continuously practicing our craft of innovation at multiple levels, we remain relevant and avoid the perception of being theoretical or distant from everyday challenges,” said Nair. As one example of how successful this strategy has been, Cambia’s product team recently utilized the Spigit platform to help define their new product roadmap for 2014. Taking an open approach to this task, they partnered with the innovation team, co-hosting a company-wide workshop. IF’s prior work launching Reform for Me had established a strong relationship with the VP of Sales; she ended up submitting the most ideas to the product challenge and stimulated the sales team to provide the highest participation levels across the company. One of the ideas was selected to become an essential part of the 2014 product design. But just like the app challenge, what was perhaps most exciting was how people had started to transform. They were sharing with one another in ways that hadn’t occurred in the recent past and they were seeing ideas make it into market. The spirit of those original 12 logging families is once again alive and well in the Cambia employees of today, fueled by the belief that they can be part of transforming an industry.