Incorporating readiness personas can strengthen your outreach effectiveness and optimize your population health engagement and coaching metrics.
by
Mac Gambill
Co-Founder & CEO at Nudge
May 30, 2018
Something one of our team members recently said has slowly become an internal mantra:
“Outreach is not engagement; however, engagement starts with outreach.”
A truer statement could not be said.
In working with hundreds of organizations on their member or patient engagement strategy it’s become apparent that effective patient or member “outreach” is still something widely misunderstood across the industry, and there is no chance of population health management success (of RAF score optimization for Medicare Advantage populations) if we can’t effectively reach people.
Ultimately the issue stems from the regular reliance on a shotgun approach to member or patient outreach, thinking that we simply want to get as many members as possible into a program.
Let me be quick to point out that this mentality eventually results in a negative perception of your progress and program success.
it’s important to realize that with any established process there will inherently be “drop off” or churn, and a member outreach initiative is no different.
Let’s imagine we have 100,000 members and we are trying to drive those with a chronic condition into a chronic care management (CCM) program.
According to recent numbers that should mean that approximately 55k of those members would fall within our target for a CCM program.
Here is where we begin to encounter pitfalls.
Most organizations have the mentality that the entire 55k fall within their target and that they need to engage as many of that cohort as possible. As a result any outreach and adoption efforts are going to be viewed in relation to the entire 55,000, meaning that success is viewed in comparison to the whole… but does that really make sense?
In truth that 55,000 should simply be treated much more like our "total addressable market," realizing that only a specific portion of the patient or member population will truly be receptive to interventional engagement, programming, or coaching.
Any marketer would be up in arms at the idea that we could create a campaign that would effectively “speak” to this broad population, and as such we need to adopt a marketer's mindset and recognize that there are a multitude of personalities and personas that make up that figure, including attributes such as readiness for change.
This is where engagement focused outreach comes in and emphasizes the importance in leveraging effective member outreach and engagement tactics [Podcast & Cheat Sheet].
Studies suggest that only about 35% of the population is within an “Action” or “Maintenance” phase meaning that approximately 65% are within “Precontemplation”, “Contemplation”, and “Preparation” and less likely to engage in a program without proper activation.
That’s all to say that while the 55,000 could be viewed as our total addressable market we can’t view it as our or serviceable market as only a portion of that population are currently in a position to engage.
Put bluntly, a lot of these people simply won’t want to engage in any type of programming or coaching initially, so we could narrow our approach by initially focusing resources on key readiness personas rather than diluting our efforts on those not ready to take action.
Consider this, marketers know that approximately 96% of site visitors are not ready to make a purchase when they come to your website, so they establish a web of content to nurture those individuals to a point where they are eventually at the proper stage.
This is to say that an effective strategy should have two key elements working in parallel.
Through engagement focused outreach we can identify and recruit those ready for interventional programming, while at the same time we can incorporate a nurturing process within the workflow to properly educate and activate those not quite ready.
Taking a step back you can see we’ve evolved our original 4-tier funnel only taking into account (1) total population, (2) those with a condition, and (3) those engaged in programming into a 6-tier funnel taking into account targeting, engagement qualification and outreach.
PHM Marketing Funnel...
This structure is not only inherently more effective, but it also enables us better identify where inefficiencies are in our funnel so that we can understand the effectiveness of our outreach efforts, versus our members enrollment process, versus our interventional coaching protocols.
If you would like to learn more about we collaborate with your team to develop effective and efficient program engagement, schedule a complimentary introductory consult today.
