Kaiser Docs Make House Sales Calls

(MoneyWatch)  Well, this is certainly a new frontier in personalized medicine. The Denver Business Journal is reporting that Kaiser Permanente doctors in Colorado are visiting potential members in conjunction with Kaiser sales associates in order to talk up the big HMO's advantages:

Last August, the health maintenance organization (HMO) launched a program in which doctors would join sales associates to tout Kaiser's services and provide guidance and medical expertise on the well-being of their members' workforce.

The concept is the brainchild of Dr. Jandel T. Allen-Davis, associate medical director for Kaiser's Colorado medical group, who started accompanying the HMO's sales teams on calls during open-enrollment season when she accepted an administrative job with the company in October 2006.

Kaiser has recruited 23 of its Colorado doctors -- who, unlike most medical professionals, are salaried -- to its "sales ambassador team." The main purpose is to put a face on Kaiser's medical care and to answer employees' questions about it, which Allen-Davis claims are more common than queries about premiums or benefit details.

Oddly enough, it seems to be working:

Barker estimates that enrollment among employees of participating member companies has increased 50 percent since the program was launched. Kaiser is Colorado's fourth-largest managed-care plan, serving 482,917 people according to a 2007 report.

It all sounds harmless enough, and there's no particular reason to think other insurers will adopt similar tactics. For starters, most big health plans have relatively few doctors on their payroll -- instead, they tend to contract with independent doctors or medical groups, whose members are unlikely to travel around singing the praises of companies many of them despise.

Still, it's got to be disconcerting to see sales people and doctors working the crowd as a team, in a dogs and cats living together sort of sense.

Photo by Flickr user Waldo Jaquith, CC 2.0