Most business leaders agree that it’s much easier to keep a customer than to acquire a new one.
The health care industry is no different — but instead of selling a product, we strive to improve people’s quality of life. If we can help our members stay healthy, provide excellent customer experience and earn their trust, our members are likely to stick with us for the long run.
We’ve found the key to achieving all of these goals is communication.
Coordinated effort
Health care has seen some dramatic changes in the last several years, making communication with our members as well as providers, community partners and regulators even more critical. Most recently, Medicaid and MyCare Ohio members are being required to re-verify their eligibility, which many members haven’t had to do in the past.
To make sure our members know how to keep their coverage, we’ve created a proactive communication plan to complement the state’s efforts.
All of our teams, including contact centers, care coordinators and community leaders are engaged in a customized communication effort with one goal in mind: bringing awareness about the new automated redetermination process.
If your company needs to communicate a large change to your customers, it takes a coordinated effort across the entire organization to get the message out. It’s not just the purview of the marketing or sales department; everyone needs to pitch in.
Targeted, multichannel campaigns
To ensure our beneficiaries are aware of these changes, Molina Healthcare has started a multichannel campaign to reach out to our members. How? By:
- Making live-agent outreach calls to all current members educating them on the process.
- Adding an on-hold message on the Member Services line for incoming callers.
- Providing talking points to partners in the community, such as the waiver service coordinators, to reinforce the message with key audiences.
- Sending community outreach coordinators and community connectors into the field with copies of the renewal letter to answer questions.
- Informing providers through our email newsletter how they can help inform their patients (and retain them for their practice as well).
- Sharing frequently asked questions via our community e-newsletter and hosting webinars for our community partners.
- Adding information to our website for members and providers with questions.
- Providing internal talking points for care managers, our contact center and anyone else who touches members and providers.
- Developing a speakers’ bureau for staff to educate their worship groups, neighborhoods and personal contacts about Medicaid redetermination.
The communication channels you utilize may be different than those at Molina, but the key is a targeted message over a variety of mediums.
On our part, it is still too soon to show results of all these efforts, but from Molina’s 35 years of experience providing high quality health care, we’ve learned that targeted communication leveraging all member touch points is vitally important to retaining our customers.
Amy Schultz Clubbs is the plan president at Molina Healthcare of Ohio, the state’s second largest Medicaid Managed Care Plan with 337,000 members.
