SeeChange: 3 things to know about the CEO change

Williams was the organizer of Extend Health, a private exchange company acquired by Towers Watson. More recently, he has been the managing director of exchange solutions at Tower Watson, one of the big players in the private exchange business. One division at Towers Watson runs the biggest private Medicare plan exchange in the country.

Williams has also been a senior vice president at eHealth Inc. (Nasdaq:EHTH) — the company that has been running the kind of popular, smoothly functioning, Web-based health insurance marketplace that the managers of the PPACA public exchange system hope to have on the Web when their exchange programs grow up.

Williams’ ties to the big-data crunchers and the private-exchange managers might help him give the value-based approach more sizzle.

The exchange managers may have even more of a stake in value-based design than the insurers and self-insured plans have, because one of the big risks facing public and private exchanges is anti-selection — the risk that the higher-risk users will prefer some of the product providers than others. Offering solid value-based programs might be a way for exchanges to reduce and manage anti-selection risk. Some private exchange systems court agents and brokers, and those exchanges might need boots on the ground to help with selling and servicing value-based programs.

2. The news might make venture capitalists take another look at health plan services firms.

Overhauling a company is not easy, but the news organizations covering the story got the company’s name right. Other venture capital-backed firms have gone through course changes and survived to earn the investments back.

SeeChange has pointed that use of its consumer engagement and health improvement system has been growing quickly. Red Herring recently gave the company its Top 100 Innovation award.

Low-risk investments in the United States are earning a return of about 0.000001 percent. Maybe some investors will read about the SeeChange and think about other ways to profit from all of the changes in the health care and health insurance markets. At some point, some of those investors may recognize that many of the people who know how the markets actually work are agents and brokers.

3. The SeeChange change could increase the appeal of social media among people who would like to run companies themselves.

Twitter underwhelmed Wall Street when it announced its earnings this week — but Williams has been tweeting actively, and interactively, under the handle @brycewatch. Maybe the tweeting and the new job are entirely unrelated, but maybe somehow, at some level, they’re related. Many health brokers already tweet, but maybe the SeeChange hire will make tweeting a little more interesting.