5 Reasons to Ditch Internal Solutions to Engage Your Highest Need Medicaid & Medicare Members (and partner with Reema instead)
Scaling and maintaining internal programs to engage and connect with hard-to-reach members within health plans is a complex undertaking. We don’t believe it’s a path that health plans need to take—there’s a better way. By partnering with someone like Reema who knows how to scale technology solutions while embracing an empathetic, human-first engagement mindset, health plans can have a larger impact on the members that are so often left behind.
It’s the members that are unreachable, those that are typically high-risk with multiple conditions and unmet social needs that need healthcare interventions the most. These are the members that Reema is best at engaging because we don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach and have a solution in place designed to scale and predict when and where your members need us.
We’ve outlined 5 reasons why you should forget your internal program and partner with Reema instead. Because we can help you move faster, complement the systems you already have in place, and meaningfully connect with more of the right people. So that more people can live healthier lives.
#1—Care Management Programs Don’t Engage the Unreachable
Over the years we’ve found that health plans are optimized to engage entire populations. But what becomes challenging is going deep and engaging the unreachable members, the ones who need the highest level of intervention. That’s what Reema does best.
When we talk to health plans about what Reema does we often hear, “we already do this,” but what health plans are doing with care management and community navigation programs is not the same thing as what Reema is doing. Reema is optimized to go deep for the members that have the highest unmet needs and have become unreachable from the perspective of the health plan.
When was the last time a member called or texted you, their health plan, to talk about their health or unmet needs?”
Reema goes beyond what a care management program can do. We take a balanced approach of technology and humanity to reach the members you can’t. The people we hire from the community to engage those members connect through shared identity and a community-based approach. They build trusting relationships, resulting in members confiding in and reaching out to their Community Guides like a trusted friend.
TLDR: Reema’s tech-enabled Community Guides know how to engage the unreachable in ways that traditional care management programs can’t.
#2—It’s Expensive to Build and Hard to Scale
Health plans are big, established institutions that don’t have the bandwidth to build member engagement programs that scale. Plus, it’s expensive and time intensive to do it right.
It costs significantly less to partner with someone like Reema than building an in-house solution. One of our clients saw the value in what Reema was doing and took it a step further. They had us engage a previously unreachable population to enroll them in additional programs through the health plan, resulting in a 40% completion for previously do not contact, refusal, and otherwise unreachable members. They couldn’t do it on their own.
And by partnering with us you don’t have to decide where to spend your money—you can build trust with members and close health gaps. So everybody wins.”
Creating a high-touch program and effective solution at scale is something we excel at. We already do this, and do it well. Reema can engage the people your health plan can’t because of things like our technology, our emphasis on shared identity, our practice of hiring from the community for the community, and by building data models that identify potential needs.
TLDR: Reema can scale while providing higher quality engagement at a lower cost.
#3—Maintaining Sophisticated Technology Requires Resources (and lots of them)
Building internal programs takes a lot of time and resources that health plans just don’t have, let alone the ability to maintain it all. It’s better to partner with an expert that can move quickly and deliver efficiently on outcomes. Reema has the technology already built and the resources to move quickly. In fact, one of our recent programs resulted in an 84% engagement rate and 29% fewer inpatient hospitalizations.
This level of engagement is all possible through our tech-enabled Community Guides that know how to build trust and make connections in their own backyard.”
Combining public data with our proprietary engagement data, Reema’s data engine anticipates which members may become high-risk. Our Community Guides then use that data to strategically intervene and head off costly care by engaging those members in the right way, and over time, improve outcomes.
Working with Reema means that you aren’t required to build and maintain sophisticated technology, freeing you up to focus on other things while we deliver on the outcomes you’re after.
TLDR: Reema can move faster and has the technology in place to simultaneously connect and scale.
#4—We Can Hire People from the Community That You Can’t
The people we hire are different from the people that health plans traditionally hire for community-based engagement and healthcare navigation roles. One of the reasons is because health plans have different and oftentimes more rigorous hiring criteria, and aren’t always able to hire the best candidate due to these limitations.
Reema on the other hand can be flexible and agile to hire people from the community. Plus, we’ve found that the people that do this really work well don’t necessarily want to work for large health plans, so they seek out organizations like Reema instead.
Partnering with Reema means you don’t have to hire, train, and manage local teams—it’s on us to know who the right people are to do the work.”
It’s important to hire from the community because shared identity and representation has historically been lacking in healthcare. But when a Community Guide lives and works in the members’ neighborhood and has first-hand experience and traversed similar difficulties, trust and connection is established much quicker and with less friction. This leads to our Guides delivering on the outcomes that matter to you most: identifying unmet social needs for high cost, hard-to-reach members, and helping those people navigate to better, healthier lives.
TLDR: Reema can attract and hire people from the communities we serve that health plans can’t.
#5—Not all Engagement Strategies are Created Equal
Remote call centers, apps, or an occasional visit to a member’s home doesn’t meet the complex demands of high risk and high cost members who are socially isolated with unmet clinical and social needs. Using call centers to check-in isn’t enough to make sure a person’s needs are met—it may work for some, but not all. Sometimes engagement requires a different approach.
When did a member last call you because the were suicidal and needed help? Is your call center staff equipped to help with that kind of intervention?”
Sometimes it takes a back-and-forth text messaging conversation with a Community Guide to uncover a previously unknown need. Sometimes it takes the Community Guide knowing exactly how far the member lives from the grocery store and their transportation options to understand their level of food insecurity. And sometimes, it takes a few home visits to learn that the member doesn’t have a bed and that’s why they’re experiencing the health issues they’ve been talking about the last few weeks. These are all things that staff in remote call centers can’t identify through brief, infrequent check-ins.
TLDR: Reema builds meaningful relationships with members beyond checking-a-box, making our Guides a trusted person in the members’ circle.
There are a lot of reasons to partner with someone like Reema to engage more of your members. But if you already have systems in place that are working, Reema’s solution is a great companion to enhance those programs and boost outcomes even further. Our next piece will talk about how Reema integrates and complements those systems, and how solutions that play well with others are the answer to helping more people get the care they need.
