Member engagement is key to both their success and your own. Healthcare member engagement not only reduces costs and improves STAR ratings and HEDIS scores but also boosts patient satisfaction.

For example, when Humana implemented a brand new consumer engagement model, they saved $2.1 million in reduced member claims. And a recently-published Population Health Management study found that Geisinger Health Plan’s telemonitoring program significantly reduced hospital readmissions and cost of care for members diagnosed with heart disease, saving about 11 percent per patient per month over four years.

Now, you’re looking towards building an engagement strategy for your own organization to successfully improve health outcomes, ROI, and member satisfaction. Here’s a checklist of five critical factors to keep in mind.

1. Personalize to individual members’ needs (in a scalable way)

 

If you want a member to stay engaged, they must feel individually cared for and that their healthcare membership experience is tailored to their specific needs. Personalizing membership experiences can help increase engagement and lower overall costs for your organization.

Today, it’s easier than ever to do so. By using personal health and historical data, demographics, and opt-in preferences, you can determine the type of content and the appropriate channels to target members with customized content that will keep them engaged throughout their health journeys.

2. Have a clear, smooth enrollment and onboarding process for members

Onboarding is the most critical period in establishing a successful relationship. This period is used to establish expectations about the relationship between your organization and your new members. Many organizations focus all their time and effort on converting leads but fail to save money by the time they onboard their new members.

Don’t make the same mistake. Establish a strategy for new member onboarding that will keep members engaged from the beginning. Connect directly with new members to welcome them to the plan, explain their benefits, set expectations, and answer their questions. These early onboarding connections are an opportunity also to re-confirm member data and tee-up health risk assessments. By engaging members in the onboarding process, you can make member engagement the baseline expectation, making it easier to keep them engaged later on.

3. Integrate seamlessly with existing programs and systems

Why reinvent the wheel? Many existing programs and systems are already focusing on member engagement. Get creative and figure out how to utilize mutually beneficial relationships with other programs to provide your members with better care. Take advantage of tried-and-true programs that have been in the space of optimizing engagement and getting results for years, like our remarkable program of blending clinical coaching with proprietary technology at scale. Smart partnerships will save you time, money, and free up resources to target specific, at-risk membership populations.

4. Generate data that can be shared across the organization

In order to personalize your members’ patient experience, you must first learn about them deeply. Generate data across the organization to better understand and target specific membership populations for increased engagement. Establish systems for sharing this data across the organization to foster better internal communication and alignment — and ultimately drive better care results.

5. Focus on engaging your members with diabetes.

Engagement is especially critical for health plan members with diabetes. These members are the ones that cost payers the most. Those who struggle with self-managing their conditions are even higher risks because the more unengaged they are, the more likely they’ll suffer from increased complications that cause your organization more financial strain.  Keeping your diabetic members engaged and healthy means a more successful program for you, especially when value-based care models are on the rise.

Conclusion

Membership engagement boils down to building relationships with the members and proactively helping them prevent further health problems. While your company may not have the bandwidth to do so, collaborating on the effort with other companies can be cost-effective and boost your ROI. Learn more about our proven approach with proven results.