Humana Hires Fidelity Executive to Oversee Customer Growth, Experience Push
Humana Inc. President and CEO Bruce Broussard has reached outside of healthcare to help shape the company’s next generation of sales and customer experience strategies, focusing first on a Medicare Advantage business that just delivered investors an ugly surprise.
Broussard announced the hiring of David Dintenfass to be Louisville-based Humana’s president of enterprise growth Jan. 25 alongside the company’s fourth-quarter loss of $591 million driven by a surprise spike in MA plan members’ utilization that Broussard called “a significant deviation from an already elevated level impacting the industry.” In his new role, which he’ll start Feb. 5, Dintenfass will focus first and foremost on customer acquisition, retention and experience—and he’ll do so after spending three decades in the finance and consumer goods sectors.
After launching his career at consulting firm McKinsey & Co., Dintenfass spent 13 years at Procter & Gamble Co. before joining Bank of America in 2010 to help integrate the banking giant’s acquisition of credit card issuer MBNA and storied investing firm Merrill Lynch. In 2015, he jumped to Fidelity Investments to be an executive vice president and its head of products and emerging growth markets.
In a statement, Broussard lauded Dintenfass’ experience implementing digital capabilities and said his work will also cover Humana’s CenterWell primary care, home health and pharmacy services unit.
“He’s a strategic leader who is customer obsessed, digitally savvy and data driven and can help us maximize investments and act on current and future trends,” Broussard said. “As we work to make healthcare easier and improve patients’ health, we need a cohesive, multi-year strategy that evolves how we think about attracting new customers and importantly, how we keep them.”
Caring for more customer encounters than expected is Humana’s short-term priority, however. The company’s fourth-quarter loss was caused primarily by insurance plan members seeking more care than expected late last year. That was a trend also noted by UnitedHealth Group Inc. leaders earlier this month and it appears to have hit Humana’s numbers harder: The company’s insurance operations produced a 91.5 percent benefits expense ratio during Q4, which was four percentage points higher than in late 2022 and led to the insurance division posting a $426 million operating loss during the quarter.
On a conference call with analysts, Broussard said Humana will react with price hikes this year, although those won’t flow through the business until 2025. He expects United and other competitors will do the same, adding that “I don't know how the industry can take this kind of increase in utilization along with regulatory changes that will continue to persist in 2025 and 2026.”
CFO Susan Diamond noted that the recent utilization increase was not due to a rise in respiratory illnesses but showed up most clearly in an increase in short-stay inpatient authorizations. The trend, she added, has persisted into January and the Humana team will look to make organizational tweaks as well as financial ones.
“As we think about 2025 and the benefit adjustments we’re going to have to make, we are being very intentional around which markets do have further integration opportunity and where we have CenterWell assets, particularly primary care,” Diamond said. “You will see us prioritize those markets to ensure that we can drive disproportionate growth […] and support that enterprise integration and margin expansion.”
Unsurprisingly, investors didn’t react well to Humana’s earnings even though Broussard and his team had previously signaled the utilization news: Shares of Humana (Ticker: HUM) were down nearly 20 percent to about $343 at one point Jan. 25 but they have since recovered some of that ground. On the afternoon of Jan. 29, they were changing hands around $363. They are, however, still down about 20 percent over the past six months, which has cut the company’s market capitalization to about $44 billion.
