MVP Health Care identifies and builds successful partnerships with Jobs-to-be-Done

Dominick Bizzarro is the Chief Growth Officer at MVP Health Care, a $3.7 billion non-profit health services company based in New York state. It’s his responsibility to chart the course for the organization’s ambitious goal to better serve its customers by growing 10X over the next 10 years.

But the healthcare industry has become both highly competitive and commoditized. Dominick knew MVP Health Care was up against national, well-capitalized organizations, and that they couldn’t compete as a low-cost provider. At the same time, Dominick and MVP were facing a variety of market disruptions, which had changed many long-held customer expectations.

Dominick knew he’d have to differentiate MVP Health Care through innovation and creating more value for their members.

“We had to be more than a health insurance company. We had to be a health services company. We needed to look at the world through our customers’ lens and fill more of their needs.“

To better serve their customers, MVP would first need to understand what these customers wanted in a health services provider. They partnered with Strategyn to understand their customers’ jobs to be done more deeply, and where they were struggling to complete the job.

These insights would allow them to identify the best opportunities to expand their services.

Using the Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) process, Dominick and his team collected customer and prioritized customer needs around jobs like:

• Selecting a health insurance plan
• Addressing new health issues
• Preventing my health from declining

The ODI insights about their customers’ needs showed MVP that they didn’t have everything required to best serve their customers in-house. Partners would need to play a key role in their ability to execute and scale. 

“We have to be more of a platform company, and to be more of a platform company, we’re going to need some additional assets and capabilities that we don’t have as an organization.”

Attracting ideal partners with Jobs-to-be-Done

What partners should they bring on to both support their mission and drive growth? And how could MVP convince these organizations to collaborate? Jobs-to-be-Done offered a framework.

Dominick and team determined that the best partners had:

• Shared vision and values, focused on customer-centricity
• Shared customers
• One or more common jobs-to-be-done

Finding partners with these traits would allow the organizations to co-create a platform solution that delivers value to their shared customers.

Thanks to their ODI project, Dominick and the team already deeply understood their own customers and jobs. They began filtering partnership opportunities through this set of three criteria.

MVP Health Care found shared values, shared customers, and a common job-to-be-done with a regional health system comprised of many hospitals and physician practices serving residents in Vermont and New York.

When the health system reached out to MVP Health Care with an RFP for a Medicare Advantage product, MVP responded with a detailed explanation of a job-to-be-done they could address together—to serve physicians and patients better.

MVP Health Care shared some of the Outcome-Driven Innovation process data, which tipped the scales in their favor. This was not clinical data on their patients, which they already had privileged access to as their care providers, but a new type of de-identified consumer data. This academic medical center loved research—but hadn’t collected or analyzed customer data like this before. They appreciated the customer-centric nature and how the data would be useful in a crowded market.

“We were in a competitive bid, so we shared some of ODI data that reflected unmet needs of patients they serve and what people were struggling with in terms of seeking and financing medical care and staying healthy. They were immediately interested—their eyes lit up.”

MVP Health Care not only won the bid with the regional health system, but the organizations worked together to co-create one of the fastest-growing Medicare Advantage products in the Northeast by leaning on the ODI insights.

The partners laser focused on a few key customer needs to produce a product that was physician-inspired, customer-centric—and totally unique to the market.

“Idea generation is usually not an issue, but we all have constrained resources. Using our data, we were able to identify just a handful of things we could do together to differentiate our offering in the marketplace.”

According to Dominick, the ODI process knocked it out of the park.

Compared to another local healthcare system that took a more traditional approach to their Medicare Advantage program, MVP Health Care and its partner ended up with 12 times the number of customers.

But the most important part was the value the partners added for their members and patients across New York and Vermont:

“We really created success for our customers because we brought something very special to the market based on the data that we saw.”