A national health plan knew they needed a new approach to better reach their historically unengaged Medicaid members, so they partnered with Icario to help. We were able to engage this difficult-to-reach Medicaid population and drive more parents to schedule a primary care visit for themselves, as well as a well-child visit for their children—leading to a 44% increase in claims generated. How’d we do it?
By understanding how people like to connect, we can build meaningful connections with members and help more adults and children stay healthy. That’s why we teamed up with an innovative health plan to introduce more digital outreach methods into their engagement strategy to move more members to action. Here’s how it worked.
Challenge
Motivating people to go to the doctor when nothing feels wrong is a challenge. What’s even more challenging is motivating a hard to reach population when simply making contact is the biggest barrier to driving action.
An innovative health plan with a large Medicaid population partnered with Icario to not only drive more people to visit their primary care physician for a wellness visit, but improve their overall contact rate. The plan was having a difficult time connecting and wanted to test the effectiveness of digital outreach methods, a method they hadn’t previously tried.
Process
For years this health plan had wanted to leverage digital channels for outreach. Historically, it had been a struggle to obtain reliable home addresses, but even more difficult to get accurate cell phone numbers and email addresses for their Medicaid members, making digital outreach nearly impossible.
Icario began this program by evaluating the plans existing member contact information and sought ways to enrich the data, resulting in the following insights:
- After enrichment, 28% of the population had full, accurate contact information
- Members with an associated email address grew from 6% to 49%
- Over 8,000 new wireless numbers were identified and we improved physical addresses for over 9,000 members
After evaluating the health plan’s current approach and incorporating Icario’s Data Enrichment strategies, we found that many records originally listed as landlines turned out to be cell phones. Coupled with the increase in reliable contact information, including email addresses and new wireless numbers, we determined that a multi-channel sequencing approach using interactive voice, email, and text messaging could lead to greater likelihood of desired outcomes. Once channels and sequences were established, Icario created various message themes designed to resonate with individuals and families at different life stages.
Approach
From the start, the goal of this program was to motivate adults to schedule a wellness visit for themselves and if they had children, schedule a visit for their child(ren) as well.
In order to make the biggest impact and spark action in the greatest number of people, Icario began this program by establishing various message themes that would resonate with different populations. Through extensive behavioral research practices, Icario has found that understanding individual healthcare attitudes, belief systems, and habits to inform messaging consistently delivers better results.
Messages were tailored to young adults, parents of young children, older guardians of young children, and parents of adolescents, then assigned to appropriate members based on what we knew about individual family structures.
The Member Experience
Icario used a sequenced, multi-channel approach that leveraged digital outreach channels including interactive voice, email, and text messaging. This resulted in members receiving strategic communications through various channels until it sparked engagement.
The messages sent asked members if they’d be scheduling a wellness visit for themselves or their children (if applicable) this year. If the member responded “yes”, they were directed to schedule the visit. If the member responded “no” they were presented with a question designed to understand the barriers the member may be facing. By the end of the interaction, the goal was to change the member’s mind and motivate them to schedule the visit.
One of the reasons this program was successful was the use of digital channels. Icario quickly discovered the effectiveness of text messaging with this population and leveraged it. Because we were able to text 83% of the total population and members were interacting, we drove higher engagement.
Results
The goal of this program was to get as many people to schedule a wellness visit as possible, both for themselves and their children. Out of the total population, 87% were successfully contacted leading to results never experienced by the health plan before.
3.5x
improvement in contact rate
69%
of population interacted
44%
increase in claims generated
