Given the many challenges that come with managing a household and raising a child, parents need all the help they can get in keeping track of their family’s health. Adult preventive wellness visits, immunizations, well-child visits and important screenings often fall by the wayside compared to immediate needs like going to work, household chores and making sure their children are excelling at school.
Family health and pediatric care only worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Routine preventive visits for both adults and children were delayed during the pandemic, and plans and providers have struggled to improve rates to pre-pandemic levels. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported a 44% decline in well-child visits and 22% drop in childhood vaccinations during the pandemic for children treated under Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
Fear of contracting COVID-19 contributed to lower rates of cancer screenings and chronic disease follow-up appointments for adults. Kaiser Permanente Southern California network experienced a nearly 80% decrease in cervical cancer screenings.
Closing these care gaps and guiding families towards healthy behaviors and resources improves plan performance. Helping parents better manage chronic diseases and receive cancer screenings reduces rates of hospitalizations and emergency room admissions, improving savings for members and plans.
By using the right digital tools and strategies, health plans can improve health outcomes for parents and children, and Healthmine has identified three tactics to get you started.
1. Grow Health Recommendations with Families
As your members get married, start families and age, their health needs will only grow. Parents will need to juggle their own preventive visits and screenings alongside the timely and important health actions that come with raising a child. Health plans can keep families on track towards living healthy lives by providing parents with personalized health recommendations that evolve alongside their families.
To start, capture a whole-person view of your members to provide the most up-to-date health recommendations. Comprehensive member records should include electronic health records, lab results, enrollment information, social determinants of health, risk factors and self-attested data to give you the most accurate picture of your members’ health needs. You should also identify spouses and dependents to improve recommendations for household units.
Integrating these data sources into a single platform allows you to rapidly identify care gaps in real time without the need for complex spreadsheet calculations. As you get a better understanding of your members’ health, align your recommendations with the appropriate quality measures.
Healthmine’s quality improvement solution automates this process for health plans and generates member-specific health action plans. Plans are automatically updated as new data is captured within our platform. For example, if lab results identify that a member is pregnant, prenatal care and post-partum care recommendations will be added to their action plan. As children grow up and dependents are added to guardians’ plans, well-child visits are routinely recommended to parents and guardians to encourage healthy development.
With the assistance of a centralized database, you can efficiently develop member-centric health action plans that inform personalized outreach and advance your family and pediatric care initiatives.
2. Optimize Outreach to Target Household Units
What channels you use to communicate with parents and guardians will play a major role in the effectiveness of your campaigns. Members may have specific channels they prefer to receive health recommendations through, and plans should consider these preferences when initiating outreach to improve compliance rates.
Employing omnichannel outreach ensures that all of your members are accounted for in your engagement strategies. Parents with lower incomes or who live in rural areas with limited internet access may rely upon mailers and phone calls to stay connected with their health plans. In contrast, families with housing insecurities may not have updated addresses with health plans, resulting in them missing important reminders about screenings and preventive visits. This can contribute to lower compliance rates, wasted resources and high spend.
Luckily for health plans, digital outreach has become more popular with modern parents. Prior to COVID-19, members expressed interest in digital tools to manage their health and receive reminders for refills, and digital adoption only increased throughout the pandemic with the expansion of telehealth. As younger demographics become parents, digital engagement has become the norm and is often the preferred channel of communication. Leveraging emails, text messages and secure in-app messages to connect parents to care enables you to improve compliance rates and build trust with members.
Digital engagement also comes at a lower price tag than traditional outreach in the long run. Health plans that leverage Healthmine's member engagement solutions have reduced the costs of traditional outreach, such as interactive phone calls and physical mailers, by 50% after three years.
However, keep in mind that emails are not considered secure and cannot be used to share personal health information such as diagnoses, medical conditions or treatments. The messaging for emails will need to be carefully crafted to provide non-member specific health recommendations, but plans can use letters, phone calls and secure in-app messages to provide more personalized messaging.
Instead of relying on one channel over the other, leverage coordinated, omnichannel outreach that prioritizes member preferred channels to have the strongest impact on your quality improvement strategies.
3. Empower Parents to Self-Manage Healthy Activities
Alongside digital outreach, giving parents tools to help them manage and oversee their families’ health action plans is another strategy for improving health outcomes. The rising adoption rate of smartphones and tablets among Medicaid members presents an opportunity for health plans to increase engagement through member-friendly apps.
While most health plans allow members to view benefits, claims and digital ID cards through smartphone apps, members also need better ways of tracking and self-managing their health conditions and medicines. Allowing members to view recommended activities, prescriptions and health-related resources like articles and videos in one application gives them more control over their health journey. By integrating member-facing applications with a centralized database, plans can automate digital outreach through secure messages and update health action plans in real time.
Healthmine’s member-facing application, Personal Health Assistant, enables parents to manage health action plans for themselves as well as their children through the Household View feature. Rather than requiring parents to log in to separate accounts, this dashboard displays recommended health activities for parents alongside the dependents on their health plan, reducing touchpoints and increasing member engagement. If a plan incentivizes health actions with rewards, Household View also enables parents to track and redeem rewards from a single account.
Leverage an All-In-One Solution for Family Engagement
Cutting through the noise of everyday life to engage families in their healthcare relies on the ability to deliver targeted campaigns at scale while keeping your budget, quality improvement goals and operational capacity top of mind. Working with the right member engagement partner enables you to efficiently implement population-specific outreach without worrying about allocating internal IT and marketing resources to design a family engagement initiative.
Healthmine’s member engagement solutions empower health plans to bolster their quality improvement strategies with personalized, family-specific health action plans, omnichannel outreach and member-friendly digital health tools. Partnered health plans have motivated members to close four times as many care gaps through Healthmine-powered engagement programs when compared to members unengaged members, resulting in improved quality measure performance and a consistent return on investment. With Healthmine, health plans have access to powerful digital tools for engaging, activating and rewarding members for making healthy choices.
Team up with Healthmine to create targeted member outreach campaigns that provide parents with the resources and tools they need to improve their family’s health one appointment at a time.