Optimize Member Outreach With 4 Content and Design Best Practices

Address barriers to care by aligning content and design around meaningful, personalized member outreach. Tailoring outreach with the right imagery and language delivers impactful engagement that motivates, empowers and drives diverse populations to reach health goals.

Explore four-member engagement best practices for delivering impactful messaging at every touchpoint and download a template for optimizing outreach with the right language and imagery.

Keep Messaging Straightforward

Navigating healthcare as a member is difficult without direct guidance. Messaging should break down complex processes and make them simple for members to understand.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) reading level requirements are an excellent place to start, but plans should always focus on using short, easy to understand sentences where possible. Each material should provide a straightforward message and call to action so members can quickly determine the next best step.

When selecting the right content to engage members with, focus on educating members about ways they can get appropriate help, such as:

• How to find an in-network doctor or clinic
• How to access medication at local pharmacies or through online services
• What transportation services are available
• Steps for setting up text message reminders for medication
• How to self-manage new diagnoses or conditions

Where possible, use photos, graphics and videos to help members remember new information.

Reflect Member Populations

Promoting inclusivity in outreach enables plans to break down barriers to engage diverse and complex populations. Members respond more positively towards imagery and language that reflects their backgrounds. In contrast, outreach that only focuses on one population limits the effectiveness of messaging to other audiences.

To avoid this, plans should personalize communications to each population cohort through persona-based criteria, including:

• Age: Speak to the different needs, values and priorities of Medicare versus Medicaid populations.
• Geographic location: Adjust resources to address healthcare services in rural, suburban and urban environments across different states.
• Cultural ideals: Pay attention to cultural differences that impact how a message is received or responded to.
• Race and ethnicity: Use imagery and language that makes a member feel represented by their plan.

Start by stratifying outreach lists based on demographic data and then applying imagery that matches member backgrounds. This is made simpler through templatized, white-labeled outreach materials like the ones developed at Healthmine, which are easily adapted to different demographics.

Deliver a Cohesive Experience

Aligning images and copy across multiple materials to provide a consistent message enables plans to build brand awareness and member trust. This starts with applying brand guidelines, including rules for colors, fonts, images and copy, to all materials to ensure members can easily recognize a health plan’s values and identity. Reinforcing these elements helps members establish meaningful relationships with their plans.

From here, design a content strategy that continuously nudges members towards the right activities. Each campaign should incorporate different channels, outreach and behavioral science techniques to keep members engaged in their care and focused on the next best steps. Compiling outreach into communication packages can help plans quickly launch campaigns to address specific goals, such as maintaining a healthy pregnancy, diabetes management and preventive care visits.

Track Key Metrics

Effective outreach begins and ends with comprehensive data. Monitoring how members react to different language and imagery allows plans to determine how messages impact barriers to care and where improvements can be made.

At a campaign-level, define key performance indicators and pay close attention to how different populations perform. Vital campaign metrics include delivery rates, open rates, clicks, unsubscribes and opt outs to provide a clear view of outreach performance. This data should be aligned with higher-level metrics such as care gaps, member satisfaction, incentive usage and quality scores to support plan performance strategies.

Based on this data, plans can experiment with different content and design elements to boost performance.

Optimize Outreach with Healthmine

Scaling campaigns across multiple diverse populations while maintaining personalization presents staff with a challenging workload when they do not have the right tools and insights to support them. Rather than forcing staff to stress over minute details, allow Healthmine’s engagement strategists and technology to streamline the process for you.

Deliver impactful engagement at scale across multiple diverse populations by refining outreach, strategies and processes with Healthmine’s Quality Relationship Management^TM (QRM) platform. Through a combination of behavioral science and integrated technology, QRM enables health plans to address all member engagement steps under one platform while reducing costs and lag time from manual processes.

Download a template to get started applying content and design best practices to member outreach. When you’re ready to optimize engagement strategies across entire contracts, reach out to us for a demo.