Beyond Outreach: Turning Health Plan Communications Into Member Action

How Command Direct and GoMo Health are bringing communications, behavioral science, and personalized engagement together to improve enrollment, retention, and redetermination.

Health plans communicate with members everyday with information related to enrollment, eligibility, redetermination, benefits, preventive care, payments, and updates about claims and coverage.

But contacting a member doesn’t necessarily mean successfully engaging them.

The real challenge is helping people understand and prioritize what matters, recognize what they need to do next, and take action, often while simultaneously juggling the demands of everyday life.

Command Direct and GoMo Health have partnered to design an integrated, multimedia outreach program integrating behavioral science and personalized digital engagement with carefully crafted healthcare communications to help Medicaid and Medicare health plans instigate member action.

Bringing Communications and Behavioral Science Together

This partnership combines the healthcare communications expertise of Command Direct with the evidence-based GoMo Health BehavioralRx science.

The result is a coordinated approach that allows health plans to engage members across multiple channels, including bidirectional SMS text messaging, email, secure chat, voice, and print/direct mail. Communications can be customized based on individual member needs, preferences, and behaviors.

This matters because effective member engagement isn’t simply about sending the right information. It is also about how, when and why that information is delivered.

A redetermination reminder, for example, only creates value if the member understands why it’s important to them, what is required and follows through. The same is true for scheduling a well visit, getting a vaccination, submitting information for a claim or understanding an eligibility requirement.

By combining personalized communications with behavioral science, the partnership is designed to help close the space between knowing and doing.

Engagement That Drives Measurable Results

The engagement methodology behind the partnership has demonstrated a 3–5x increase in programmatic opt-in and retention.

Health-plan use cases highlighted by Command Direct and GoMo Health include a

• 98% enrollment rate with the largest Medicaid managed care organization in the U.S.
• 68% retention/completion rate with a Medicaid-managed health plan
• 45% member activation rate with one of the 10 largest health plans in the U.S.

These results demonstrate why the distinction between outreach and engagement matters. Sending information is an activity. Helping someone act on it is a nurtured experience that yields an outcome.

Supporting Members Across the Journey

The Command Direct and GoMo Health approach supports health plans across multiple stages of the member experience:

• For enrollment, retention and redetermination, personalized and automated communications can help members understand requirements, remember important deadlines and take necessary next steps.
• For health and preventive care, engagement can nurture actions such as scheduling well visits and receiving vaccinations.
• For benefits and eligibility, communications can help answer questions and guide members toward appropriate actions while helping health plans reduce unnecessary call center volume.

And for ongoing member support, real-time (secure) chat provides another way to manage individual and group communications and exchange information at scale.

What’s the Goal?

The goal is not more communication. The goal is member response – and that comes from communication that’s simple and highly directed, easy to understand, sent at the right time in a person’s day, in the voice and tone with which they feel connected, from a resource that’s trusted, with a clear and direct call to action.

Personalization That Goes Beyond a Member’s Name

Central to the approach is GoMo Health BehavioralRx, an evidence-based engagement science that applies cognitive and psychological techniques to encourage in-the-moment action.

BehavioralRx enables engagement to be personalized around a member’s needs, preferences and behaviors rather than relying solely on broad, one-size-fits-all outreach. The science has been successfully applied in instigating action across more than 100 managed care organizations, health plans and health systems/hospitals.

BehavioralRx creates an important distinction between personalized communication and simply personalized content. For health plans serving diverse Medicaid and Medicare populations, that ability to meet members where they are is essential.

From Member Data to Better Engagement

Engagement is tracked and measured throughout the engagement pathway to leverage insights into human behavior and response time. Instead of asking only, “Did we send the message?” health plans can begin asking more meaningful questions:

• Did the member engage?
• If so, at what point of communication?
• Did they understand what to do?
• Did they take the next step and complete it accurately?
• What can we learn to make the next interaction more effective?

That shift—from measuring outreach volume to understanding outreach-to-action is critical to creating stronger member experiences.

Creating an Engagement Advantage for Health Plans

Health plans don’t need another communication channel simply for the sake of adding another channel. They need ways to make the communications they already depend on more relevant, actionable and effective.

The Command Direct and GoMo Health partnership brings together the communications infrastructure needed to reach members and the behavioral science to better engage them.

Because the measure of effective communication isn’t simply whether a message was delivered. It’s whether it helped someone take the next step.

Discover how Command Direct and GoMo Health are helping Medicaid and Medicare health plans get member attention and act — increasing enrollment, strengthening redetermination and retention and supporting better health outcomes.