How Data is the Key to Improving Healthcare Member Engagement
Even though member engagement has been a top investment priority for 80% of healthcare payors, the initial results have been mostly anemic. Fewer than 21% of consumers noticed any improvement in their overall healthcare experience, despite the fact that almost two-thirds of organizations are driving their engagement strategies toward consumer-centricity. What is preventing a much needed boost in value-based healthcare? In many cases, the problem is the slow implementation of data management solutions and reporting and advanced analytics best practices within payor organizations.
To truly make strides towards improving member engagement, healthcare payors must consider the data-driven strategies below:
Improving Big Picture Engagement
Effective member engagement begins by understanding what motivates the behavior and decision making process of different member demographic groups. Though there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to engaging a plan member of any particular group, payor organizations can identify broader yet targeted strategies that reduce the costs of their healthcare engagement process while improving care outcomes. To achieve that result, payors need to properly evaluate and analyze their member data.
You could start with a common problem like appointment attendance. For example, the National Center for Biotechnology Information finds that 23% to 34% of outpatient appointments are missed each year, which are decreasable by simply offering consumers reminders they’ll actually check. Studies show that 80% of people prefer text message reminders about their upcoming appointments. So in instances where payors have visibility into patient appointments and want to improve quality measures, it is possible to lower no-show rates further by analyzing different reminder messages, both past and present, to see which is most effective among different demographics for different types of appointments.
Data analysis can also be used to identify and overcome barriers to engagement within your own processes. For example, your organization can evaluate different touch points throughout the engagement lifecycle to find opportunities for improvement. Is the customer experience positive? Are members making it from one step to the next in the scheduling funnel? Are certain practices more effective at convincing members to attend appointments than others? By running reports to answer these questions, you can identify any shortcomings in your engagement process and take fast action to improve outcomes.
Customizing Member Experiences
Though consumers might fall into similar demographics, each member requires an individualized and precise approach, just as they would with their medical treatment, to encourage them to capitalize on the additional benefits, services and conveniences their health plan provides. With the volume of healthcare data predicted to reach 2,314 exabytes by 2020 (one exabyte = one billion gigabytes), there is already more than enough data to customize member experiences.
Let’s say you wanted to encourage one of your members (call him John) to schedule vaccination appointments for his three children. By simply personalizing the subject line of your scheduling email, John will be 26% more likely to open and read the email’s contents. You could then take that a step further by providing links and contact information to help him schedule an appointment with his family’s specific pediatrician (information that is readily available through his family’s EHRs) and using persuasion methods that have proven to work with John in the past (be it appealing to his sense of reason, his emotions, etc.). As your organization uses all relevant data to increase his odds of scheduling these critical appointments for his children, you also increase the overall quality of his member experience.
Though the benefit to improving HEDIS scores and member engagement is immense, many payor organizations need to first transition toward more effective data management. Your members’ health records are only useful if data is defined, mastered and governed accordingly, enabling people within your organization to quickly and easily find essential information within your data that they can use to transform member experience from start to finish.
Ready to start improving healthcare member engagement? Contact our team to leverage your data to enhance your members’ overall experience.
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