Boosting Medicare Advantage Acquisition, Engagement, & Retention With Digital Health Solutions

In recent years — and particularly since the passage of the Affordable Care Act — the Medicare Advantage space has seen rapid growth, with Medicare Advantage retention, engagement, and acquisition not always able to keep pace. And in some way, it’s no wonder, given that:

Almost half of Medicare beneficiaries (48%) have enrolled in an Advantage or other supplementary plan
As of 2023, there are nearly 4,000 Medicare Advantage plans available across the country
The average beneficiary has access to about 43 different options — more than double what was available in 2018

While more choice is great for consumers, it also means more competition for payers. Add to that the fact that plan ratings are slipping, and there’s more pressure than ever for payers to step their game up — and some of the most valuable (yet underutilized) tools available are digital health solutions.

But how exactly can digital health solutions help? Let’s dive into it.

Acquiring New Medicare Advantage Beneficiaries

Many Medicare Advantage payers hesitate to venture outside of the more traditional marketing channels — TV ads, radio ads, direct mailing — due to the government-established restrictions that exist. But there are many ways to leverage modern marketing solutions while remaining compliant.

Optimizing Your Website

Creating a more navigable website, for example, is an impactful yet completely above-board way to improve user acquisition. This includes not only making the website more accessible, but also more consumer-friendly. While shopping for a healthcare plan isn’t the same as shopping for clothes or electronics, of course, there’s a lot that healthcare organizations can learn from eCommerce sites when it comes to making a more user-friendly website. A few ideas to get you started:

Easy compare-and-contrast charts that lay out all of your different plans’ features, benefits, star ratings, and prices to facilitate simple, side-by-side evaluation
Quizzes that help visitors determine which plan is right for them
Chatbots to answer FAQs and direct people to the right information
Interactive, engaging content like videos and infographics
Accessible design, such as closed captions on videos, alt text on photos, and keyboard-only navigation for those who use screen readers

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Creating Nurture Campaigns

Another valuable strategy to include in your marketing toolkit is nurture campaigns: marketing pathways designed to convert prospects into buyers through compelling content.

You can create different marketing pathways based on things like age group, zip code, product lines, gender, SDoH factors, and products. Within these streams, share resources around your plan, the services you offer, and how they address prospects’ pain points. Consider including things like infographics, video testimonials, fact sheets, FAQs, etc.

Beneficiaries today feel overwhelmed by the volume of outreach they receive, so paying for more TV spots featuring a celebrity spokesperson touting your services isn’t the way to move the needle — instead, you need to think about a more targeted approach. When you’re showing the right content to the right audience, less is more.

Engaging Medicare Advantage Enrollees to Improve Care Metrics

When it comes to improving clinical metrics, leveraging digital health solutions can help promote preventive care and encourage healthy lifestyle choices. When flu season is approaching, for example, you can use digital outreach to send reminders to members via text and email to get their flu shot. Consider including engaging content here like videos, infographics, and FAQs.

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Including links to schedule appointments and resources can be helpful as well. If you’re encouraging a healthy diet and exercise to prevent diabetes, for example, you can link out to — or even partner with — food-as-medicine services like Season Health. If you’re trying to get members to attend an annual exam, on the other hand, you can share links to medical transportation services like SafeRide or home care services like MedArrive.

Another great way to engage enrollees is through a care coordination tool. Using one centralized platform to record and update patient information, provide care instructions, and facilitate communication between patients, providers, and payers can reduce the risk of post-discharge adverse events and lead to better overall health outcomes.

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Ensuring Long-Term Medicare Advantage Retention

Customer service and responsiveness play a significant role in Medicare Advantage retention, and one of the biggest opportunity areas is payment — a source of chronic frustration for healthcare users. Not only can upfront costs be prohibitively high — the lack of transparency and confusion around how to make payments is often exasperating as well. In these situations, enabling digital payments through your website and app, itemizing costs, and allowing for the creation of payment plans can all help.

With all the buzz around AI, you may want to look into customer service chatbots as well. Chatbots do a great job of answering FAQs and directing patients to relevant resources, which helps lighten the workload of your customer service team. For more complex requests and complaints, of course, you’re going to want to direct members to real people. Still, chatbots have a strong internal use case as well. Customer service representatives can interact with chatbots on their end to search for standardized responses and escalation procedures.

The best way to boost Medicare Advantage retention, though, is by listening to members and acting on their feedback — which makes a digital survey tool so critical. Traditional surveying methods like phone or mail-in surveys suffer from low engagement, which prevents you from getting a representative sample of data, and long wait times, which hinder your ability to set things right.

Sending survey links via text message is a quick and easy way for members to leave feedback — and for you to act upon it in real time. And solving issues as soon as they surface goes a long way toward improving member satisfaction and ultimately, your customer service rating.

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Embracing a Digital Future

The interest in Medicare Advantage plans is growing at a rapid pace, which presents both a great opportunity for payers to grow, but also a challenge to maintain quality as they scale. In order to do so, it’s imperative that payers adopt the right digital health solutions for them. With the right digital health strategy in place, Medicare Advantage payers can acquire, engage with, and retain members better than ever — making them well-positioned to ride the growth in the years to come.

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