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Anders Sörman-Nilsson (Photo: Keynote)

Life Health > Long-Term Care Planning

How to Grease the Long-Term Care Planning Gears

By Margie Barrie

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What You Need to Know

  • The ILTCI Conference is meeting in person in Raleigh, North Carolina, this week.
  • Anders Sörman-Nilsson says one key to encouraging planning is to make everything easier.
  • Some of the tools for doing that are smart phones, problem forecasting, story telling and pictures from the future.

We have to use technology to defuse the world’s long-term care time bomb, by getting the LTC planning gears unstuck.

Anders Sörman-Nilsson, a futurist, gave us that advice yesterday, in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the 2022 Intercompany Long-Term Care Insurance Conference.

Sörman-Nilsson told us that those of us still in the long-term care insurance and long-term care planning communities have already shown that we know how to adapt to change.

“The pandemic has been the biggest human behavioral change project ever seen,” Sörman-Nilsson told us.

Now, he said, insurers and advisors must adapt further, by reducing the friction that keeps individuals and society from preparing for the aging of the population.

Here are some of his ideas for how to do that.

1. Use smart phones more.

By for example, letting customers submit long-term care insurance claims through their phones.

2. Predict what consumers’ new problems will be.

We need to try to offer consumers’ solutions for the problems that are likely to come up soon, not just for the problems they have now.

3. Build trust by telling stories.

Stories can guide consumers’ thinking from the known to the known.

4. Tell the stories with help from digital tools.

One way: By using morphing technology to show clients what they might look like in 30 years.

Simply looking at an image of their future selves might change how some clients think about long-term care planning.

5. Streamline.

A little inconvenience for someone else might not seem like much to us, when it has no effect on us.

But Sörman-Nilsson told us about a study that showed how “a little harmless friction” affected what consumers do in the real world.

Researchers found that, at an airport, forcing travelers to spend just 10 more minutes checking in and going through security reduced their spending at the airport by 100%.

The moral: One way to encourage better LTC planning might be to work toward creating a seamless customer experience.

Sörman-Nilsson closed by urging us to think about the big picture, and about the opportunity we have to improve the future for our clients.

What is the kind of future we want to create?

Margie BarrieMargie Barrie, an agent with ACSIA, has been writing the LTCI Insider column since 2000. She is blogging about long-term care planning with Chris Petillo, and preparing to launch an LTC podcast series, at Faegre Drinker’s LTCi Summit website.

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