Member engagement is essential to a positive patient payment experience, while also ensuring that healthcare organizations get reimbursed in full for the services that are provided.
During Becker's Hospital Review's 2023 Payer Issues Roundtable, in a session sponsored by RevSpring, Rich Delperdang, senior vice president for business development at RevSpring, moderated a roundtable about how payers can optimize their member engagement strategy, messaging and member stratification approaches.
Three key insights were:
1.) The types of messages and communication channels used by payers shape members' responses to requested actions. Satisfaction surveys, requests for enrollment, reminders for recommended screenings and reminders to pick up medications are some of the most common types of messages that payers send.
"Engaging with members in a way that promotes the [desired] action depends on personalizing the engagement track for each member," Mr. Delperdang said. Several roundtable participants concurred, pointing out that members often do not answer engagement attempts that are delivered by phone, but are much more likely to respond if communications are delivered via text or email.
2.) Omnichannel communications may be in vogue, but firing off messages on all fronts can lead to member confusion and abrasion. When payers contact members via multiple channels, it can be hard to attribute responses to any given channel. "If you are hitting them with six different methods, you don't necessarily know was it the flyer that you mailed them, was it the text or was it the email that elicited a response?" one roundtable participant observed. This uncertainty reduces opportunities to optimize the type of message and the specific channel that a member is most likely to respond to.
To prevent this uncertainty about communication effectiveness, another attendee said that when members call into her organization, the organization tracks the emotion of those calls. For example, if a call is motivated by frustration, the payer tries to understand where the pain point is rooted and act on it.
Another participant said his company stratifies members by categorizing them as being high-touch or low-touch; high-touch referring to a preference for live calls and low-touch referring to a preference for more passive communication approaches.
3.) Ideally, consumer behavior, predictive analytics and proprietary payer data can be used together to determine the content of personalized engagement outreach. Mr. Delperdang said that taking these factors into account is necessary because the alternative — applying a blanket approach to engagement — can backfire. He cited as an example a provider organization that RevSpring worked with that suffered the consequences of that approach when it implemented a $200 incentive for members to complete a "gap in care" screening. Because not all members needed the screening or because some had already completed it, members perceived this incentive as an unnecessary expense which they believed the payer had sneakily reflected in their premiums.
"When you're trying to figure out what motivates and inspires your members [to take a desired action], a key part of it is getting to know them from a personalization standpoint," Mr. Delperdang said.
For best results, payers should focus on engaging members through their preferred channel of communication, reducing the overall number of channels they use for messaging each individual member, tracking emotions as a way of proactively addressing pain points in the user journey and using member-level data to selectively offer personalized incentives.