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How would you describe the relationship between the business and IT at MOBE? We have a strong IT backbone at MOBE, which goes hand-in-hand with privacy and security – both are critical in our business. We believe that technology enables our business and should flex to meet our stakeholders’ and participants’ needs. From early on, we invested in building a robust architecture to ensure the safety of our customers’ information. This has really mandated the close collaboration and integration of IT with, and within, the business function. As we continue to build out new solutions, IT has to be on the ground floor and closely integrated, which is part of the reason we hired our first Chief Digital Officer in March of 2020, Meg Rush, who has a long history in this industry. Are there factors that help make communication between business and IT successful at MOBE? The technology function needs to deliver solutions for real business needs. To do this, we actively engage as a joint team to understand the business and leverage agile processes to prioritize work, identify solution alternatives, and iterate on new capabilities. The business prioritizes new features and functionality, develops a collaborative roadmap, and negotiates a delivery schedule. Collectively, the business and IT team partner to evolve our solutions. Currently, we have a large effort underway to build out our future architecture that underpins our business.
Last year we opened our Innovation Center in Reno, Nevada, to accelerate these efforts. One of our top priorities is to continue advancing new solutions that help people engage with MOBE when, where, and how they want to make impactful progress toward their health goals. At MOBE, we work with a “hidden” population in healthcare – the 5% of people who account for 20% of healthcare costs. Today, we help these people through personalized support with one-to-one guidance on lifestyle, medication, and health care choices. Looking to the future, we are applying learnings from our current work to serve new populations, leveraging our analytics and data science competency with our unique humanistic approach to helping people. Our customers ask us to serve new populations; we want to find those that our solution is best suited and most likely to help. A third key priority is to expand with self-insured employers. Our founder, Mark Evenstad, was a self- insured employer and saw firsthand how some people are struggling to get healthier and happier despite being in and out of doctors’ offices every other week and taking several medications. Seeing this challenge was part of the inspiration behind starting MOBE. The people MOBE serves aren’t having trouble accessing the system – in fact, they’re accessing healthcare more than most people. They need different, more personalized support to see improved health outcomes – and that’s where MOBE comes in.
The rooftop at MOBE’s new office.
MASSIVE TRANSFORMATION Across your career, how have you seen the relationship
between business and technology progress?
Throughout my career, the relationship between business and technology has transformed massively. I remember when I was an auditor at Arthur Andersen lugging these enormous audit files across downtown Minneapolis. Very little was done electronically. Today, I don’t have a single file in my office – I don’t think you could find a pen either. As consumer preferences have changed, digital health solutions have become mainstream. We embed technology in how we serve our participants. Capabilities like online scheduling, biometric monitoring, and health tracking applications allow us to interact with participants in new, engaging ways and demonstrate through metrics how our program helps our participants make progress in their health journey. Today, when a potential participant opens a welcome email and indicates an area of interest, we can immediately respond with resources based on their interests.
14 | Finding the Silver Lining
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