10 Tips for Increasing HRA Completion

A Health Risk Assessment (HRA) can provide your plan with crucial member data like health status, risk factors and demographics that can guide you in creating a member engagement strategy. With this information, you have the opportunity to tailor a member's plan experience to their needs and risks, improving health outcomes and your plan’s performance. The benefits of collecting HRA responses include:

• Individualized care planning
• Early identification of health risks and care coordination needs
• Cost management and resource allocation
• Population health management
• Enhanced predictive analysis and risk stratification
• Gather social determinants of health

Even though completing an HRA can greatly benefit a member’s health by identifying crucial care gaps, many plans struggle to motivate members to complete this lengthy assessment. Our Healthmine experts crafted this list of 10 strategies you can use to increase HRA completion rates and effectively gather the data you need to close care gaps and improve your Star Rating.

Want a more detailed discussion on maximizing HRA response rates? Watch this webinar recording.

Tips to Maximize HRA Response Rates

1. Personalize member outreach

Members are more likely to complete the HRA when they understand how it will specifically benefit them. Take a member’s health concerns, demographics and previous plan interactions into consideration when you’re creating your HRA outreach strategy. You should also tailor communications to a member’s preferred language and communication channel.

2. Use a multi-channel approach

Incorporate emails, text, phone calls and mail to reach more members with a diverse variety of communication preferences. Using a multi-channel approach to communicate with members outperforms single-channel communications by up to 15%.

3. Motivate with rewards

Offering incentives like gift cards or discounts on health-related services, especially to members who are harder to engage, can be an incredibly effective method for increasing HRA completion. Healthmine partnered with a Medicare Advantage client to improve their HRA completion by using rewards. The program led to a 35% increase in HRA submissions and a drastic increase in gap closure across key quality measures. Read the success story.

It also provides you the opportunity to immediately respond to your members when they complete their HRAs, strengthening the reciprocal relationship with your members.

4. Prioritize accessibility

It's important that members with disabilities, different preferred languages and low health literacy complete their HRAs so you have an accurate understanding of the health needs of your member population. Provide HRAs in multiple languages and accessible formats (like large print or braille) and offer assistance for members who may need help understanding and completing their HRAs.

5. Build trust and credibility

Asking members to provide sensitive health information digitally or by mail can be a big request, especially for members who are concerned about privacy. Use a trusted HRA provider and make it easy for your members to understand every step of the HRA completion process.  

Show that you’re a committed partner in their health by explaining how you’re protecting their information, delivering on any rewards you promised and using their responses to improve their care and plan experience.

6. Use positive framing to explain benefits

Members are typically more motivated by positive messages to take action in their health journey. Focus on the personal benefits to the member of completing their HRA versus the risks or negative outcomes of not completing their HRA.  

For example, “Completing your HRA helps us understand the actions you can take to improve your health” is a more positive, effective message than “Not completing your HRA can limit our ability to provide the best care.”

7. Send consistent reminders

Motivating your members, especially those harder to reach, to complete their HRAs will likely require multiple communications. Send reminders via multiple channels, using personalized messaging and offering rewards for the most effective outreach strategy.

Sending consistent communication also demonstrates to your members that you’re an engaged, committed partner in their care.

8. Use nudging and digital automation

Make it as easy as possible for your members to complete their HRA by using digital cues to encourage engagement. Display the HRA prominently in the member-facing portal, and set HRA completion as the default option during sign-ups and appointments.

You can also automate a member’s known information to pre-fill within their digital HRA to streamline the completion process.

9. Incorporate social proof into your messaging

Framing HRA completion as the social norm can be a powerful way to use social proof and peer influence to motivate members. Share the percentage of members who complete their HRA and incorporate testimonials from members who have benefited from completing their HRA into your messaging.

10. Acknowledge the member's effort

Completing an HRA can be a long and tedious process, so it’s important that your members feel appreciated for their time and effort. Delivering rewards or providing next steps can reinforce their action, encouraging your members to engage in positive health actions in the future.

Upgrade to a digital-first HRA strategy

Healthmine handles the entire HRA outreach and collection process so you can spend more time analyzing your members’ health data and taking action to improve outcomes. Using a member’s health concerns and preferred communication channel and language, you can activate members with personalized, digital-first outreach to encourage them to easily complete their HRA.  

Then, you can monitor completion rates and analyze responses in your plan-facing dashboard to intervene quickly for a member’s specific health risks. For members who prefer printed HRAs, we manually input their responses into your dashboard. This invaluable member data lives in our all-in-one plan management platform Quality Relationship Management™ (QRM®) so you can craft personalized, targeted outreach year-round.

You can achieve higher HRA completion rates for improved member care and a better Star Rating with Healthmine’s end-to-end digital HRA — contact us for a demo.

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