Are Your Members Giving Your Plan A Thumbs Up?
It’s that time of year when health plans are designing their benefit packages for the upcoming selling season, setting goals for their sales team, and implementing strategies to achieve greater success than the year before. But have health plans lost sight of what really matters to membership growth? Are health plans thinking about their current members while planning for their future members? If not, you should know each retained member contributes an incremental amount annually. Do you know the impact of a single member?
Member retention is key to long-term success. Net growth does not happen with new sales alone but with a careful balance between new sales and the retention of members once they have enrolled. Plans can meet all sales goals and still end up significantly below membership and revenue targets if members disenrolll from the plan.
Members leave a health plan for a variety of reasons, including dissatisfaction with the health plan, the product, provider access, misinformation/marketing abuse, cost sharing too high, and service or quality of care, but the majority of disenrollments are within the plan’s control.
Dissatisfied members may enroll into a competitor’s Medicare Advantage or Part D plan, a Medicare Supplement, or return to Original Medicare coverage. Proactively addressing factors which lead to member disenrollment should be the focus of any member retention effort.
What is a member retention program? A member retention program encompasses member engagement, satisfaction, and performance measures. A successful program should be geared around the relationship between the member, the plan, and trusted advisors.
Careful design of retention initiatives and a commitment to communication will deliver a significant and positive impact on enrollment and revenue generation. The foundation of an effective member retention strategy is cross-functional alignment, placing the member at the center of the health plan’s initiatives and core business functions.
Sales and Marketing typically are responsible for attracting new members and keeping them engaged during the onboarding process, but a true retention strategy contains efforts from all disciplines inside the health plan. No one department can be responsible for the full engagement of a member. Once a member is part of the health plan, they touch Customer Service, Communications, Risk Adjustment, Care Management, Compliance, and Operations. Their experience in all of these aspects of the health plan drives the retention of that member which in turn helps health plans increase Star Ratings and helps the health plan reinvest their performance bonuses in more and better member benefits.
Utilizing our cross-functional expertise, Gorman Health Group can work with your health plan to create a customized retention program focusing on strategies that address key factors driving your disenrollment and negatively impacting revenue.
For more information, please contact Carrie Barker-Settles at cbarkersettles@ghgadvisors.com.
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Gorman Health Group’s marketing experts have developed strategic plans for hundreds of Medicare Advantage Plans, Prescription Drug Plans, Special Needs Plans and Exchange participants. We will work with you to understand your market, mining demographic data for opportunity and finding the gaps in the competitive field into which your plan can fit.Visit our website to learn more about our services >>
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