Simple, superficial engagement cannot support the right level of understanding you or your members need: personalized messages at the right time using the right methods to inspire action. Health care organizations fall into a habit of broadcasting to members without connecting with them.
Shift away from hollow engagement strategies toward authentic, ongoing relationships that improve experiences and outcomes. Explore how you can embrace strategies for meaningful engagement.
Engaging with patients and health plan members has always been a core component of effective care, but it feels impossible when competing demands stretch you in different directions. Stakeholders want to see progress, while individuals grasp for solutions to their problems.
The result? “Engagement” has lost its original meaning to become more of a buzzword and a box to check. Health care is leaning more on a litany of digital tools and metrics to do the heavy lifting, rewarding engagement without checking if it leads to meaningful action, such as scheduling — and actually keeping — an appointment. But simply responding to a question or answering the phone doesn’t help people pursue better health.
When members visit a primary care physician, it’s common to spend more time with the assistant because the doctor is just that busy. Unless the member has already felt empowered to engage more deeply — ask questions, take notes, and detail aspects of their lives that may be affecting their outcomes — these visits may be superficial.
In these cases, plans often check an engagement box indicating that the patient made and kept their appointment. But that alone doesn’t build rapport or support individual needs. Neither do quick-win shortcuts:
Bring several tools together to form a more comprehensive approach.
Engagement washing does a disservice to overall care, potentially hampering opportunities for early interventions or spotlighting vanity metrics. Instead, members who experience better engagement across the care journey are more likely to have elevated interactions and outcomes.
Engagement should be the beginning of a relationship — not the end. And instead of vague questions such as “How are you doing?” it should be ongoing and personalized.
Deep engagement builds the kind of trust that empowers members to share what they truly need. But when encounters with care teams are so few and far between and staff are stretched too thin, plans need to foster connections and uncover nonmedical drivers of health (NMDOH) needs some other way so members can understand what’s impacting their health outcomes and follow through on solutions.
Bring everything together, connecting to clinical, behavioral and social health needs. A whole-person health approach makes people feel seen and heard, building trust and driving action. Health plans have several opportunities to elevate their engagement game:
What does member data tell you? Analyze claim data for specific members to find occurrences of low-value care — such as ED visits — or insights from NMDOH to help individuals better manage their care.
Build connections with members through regular, individualized communication. They look to your guidance to find clinicians, schedule appointments and receive advice that will improve their outcomes. Seeing your plan as a helper can boost further engagement, especially if your communications are in a space and cadence members prefer.
Which care experiences are hits, and which ones are misses? Create a feedback process to gather input from both providers and members to assess engagement strengths and weaknesses. Forming a feedback loop helps plans improve and gather clinical documentation for new or alternative treatments.
A well-designed engagement solution aligns strategy, data and experience. Taking such a holistic approach sidesteps engagement washing to offer key benefits for members and plans alike.
Better engagement paves the way for seamless, guided experiences across the care journey. Plans that offer support for medical and nonmedical challenges that affect outcomes — including timely access to effective solutions and building trust surrounding mental health concerns — empower members to seek appropriate resources.
Your bottom line matters just as much as results. And by hammering out an engagement solution, plans achieve both scalable outreach and measurable ROI. Integrating timely nudges and navigation support closes gaps in care, fostering more engaged populations who contribute to positive quality ratings and lower costs.
Swapping engagement washing with more concerted efforts to improve benefit and care delivery serves two sides of the same coin: health care and members. Genuine engagement aligns with health literacy, savings and so much more.
When members genuinely engage in their health care, the results prove it. It’s like night and day, with treatment plan adherence and health literacy jumping as they take active roles in their well-being — from quitting smoking to losing weight. Members who understand and agree with their treatment plans are far more likely to stick with them, reducing health risks and medical expenses.
Doctors don’t know how to help if members don’t speak up. Open communication and engagement drive better care experiences. When they take advantage of these opportunities, they recover better, report higher care satisfaction and experience lower levels of anxiety or depression.
Engagement spurs action, promoting healthier behaviors and outcomes. It’s a trickle-down effect where patients and plan members feel more knowledgeable and empowered, motivating them to manage their own health through vaccinations, preventive care and other actions.
Health plans like yours also win by fostering genuine patient engagement. This includes the elephant in the room: cost savings. Boosting engagement reduces high-acuity care — such as inpatient and ED visits — so members achieve better outcomes and your costs shrink. Adding telehealth, remote monitoring and engagement tools to the mix manages costs even more.
Of course, there’s more to it than dollars and cents. The bond is simply stronger among highly engaged individuals, enhancing member loyalty and driving better quality scores for measures such as the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set and Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems. Members who feel seen and heard are three times less likely to have unmet medical needs and twice as likely to seek care when it's needed.
Engagement isn’t the goal — better health is. It’s just the start of a broader health transformation. A smart engagement solution can bridge the gap between intent and outcome for both plans and members.
Find the right solution to turn engagement into action and move from engagement washing to something more meaningful. Whatever your choice, make it fit across your operation — from care coordination to marketing to analytics — and embrace the newfound accountability.
The key to engagement is getting members to open the door to communication. Pyx Health combines empathetic humans with technology to get members involved.
But that’s not all. Now available: FarmboxRx unlocks new opportunities for member engagement. Food insecurity is one of the top needs of the populations we serve. With FarmboxRx, plans can provide vulnerable members with home-delivered food boxes — and a side of educational materials to boost health literacy and build trust.
Tour the full Pyx Health solution and reach out to discuss your engagement goals.