Navigating Healthcare Choices: Optimizing Open Enrollment with Collective Health
In the labyrinthine world of healthcare management, Collective Health (CH) stands as a beacon of innovation, offering a comprehensive concierge service as a third-party healthcare manager. But the start of their member relationships begin at Open Enrollment, a moment they lack insight and control.
Offering
Researcher-in-Residence
Sector
Health Insurance
Approach
Collective Health is known for its high-touch and deeply personal approach to health insurance. But during the pandemic, it scaled up and went remote, limiting the magic of open-enrollment puppy parties. With that growth came a lack of insight and direction in a deeply critical part of their member experience.
Drawing upon a mosaic of methodologies, I embarked on a multifaceted exploration of the open enrollment landscape. Through comprehensive research and stakeholder engagement, I crafted a holistic understanding of the open enrollment process from inception to implementation.
Key Questions
The scope of the work was expansive – with so many new team members questions ranged from what happened at client’s companies during open enrollment to what happens at Collective Health? Who makes each decision and how does this process run? How do we not reinvent it every year? And of course, do members know what they’re signing up for in Open Enrollment?
Intentional Discovery
Given the expansive nature of the question, my work focused on locating and centralizing knowledge from a wide array of sources. I conducted 22 internal interviews, carefully building buy-in from each party. We expanded our list slowly by asking participants who else should be included. This helped fill in the gaps of a missing org chart and shifting roles.
Early on, it was believed Open Enrollment was a “black box” at each client. Through creative internet searching, I could locate 13 publically open Benefits Administration sites from CH clients, allowing us to see firsthand how clients introduced Collective Health, where there were frequent misunderstandings, and giving us insight into the kinds of collateral clients would actually use.
Then, collaborating with the data science team, I surveyed 5000 current members, leading to qualitative interviews.
Finding client’s BenAdmin sites was a critical help in understanding how Collective Health is framed to their members.
Research included evaluation of current tools and a deep dive into how each were mainatined.
Outcomes and Recommendations
As a team, we determined the most impactful delivery as we did the research.
For the larger team, I created a single source of truth around the process for Open Enrollment. From this work, teams were able to identify key processes that could be discarded or overhauled to reduce unnecessary workload. Cross-team collaborators like Design and Business Insights were able to identify core processes for evaluation and build new relationships.
For the strategic direction setters, we provided core frameworks to clarify all work - like a clearer distinction and understanding of client types - recommended strategic focuses, and smaller immediate fixes.
One key insight was the way Collective Health missed multiple opportunities to introduce themselves to their members on their own website. The team has since fully rectified this with an inviting, clear, and member-directed page.