How Reema Reached the Unreachable, Built Trust, and Boosted Outcomes
Achieving an 84% engagement rate with a historically unreachable, high-risk Medicaid member population through tech-enabled Community Guides.
Overview
Reema is transforming how people navigate the gaps between health care and social care using technology and Community Guides who share identity with the members we serve.
Reema’s approach improves healthcare experiences, which leads to higher member engagement and a reduction in costs.
Challenge
Identifying unmet social needs for health plan members can be difficult. What’s more is identifying those needs when you can’t reach the members to begin with. Engaging high needs Medicaid members can be a huge barrier to better health and a consistent challenge for even the most innovative health plans.
One of the largest health plans in the country partnered with Reema to engage their most unreachable population. Traditional outreach methods weren’t delivering results, so this health plan knew a new approach was needed.
By successfully engaging this population and building meaningful relationships, Reema was able to identify additional member needs, build trust, and provide the right solutions and resources to the member’s most pressing needs.
Solution
Through a multi-channel engagement approach using technology-enabled Guides from the community, Reema was able to engage members in a way that the health plan couldn’t on its own. Community Guides are key to successful engagement and resource navigation because they’re able to build relationships with members through things like shared identity, language, and familiarity with the community the member lives in. By hiring Guides from local communities, we’re able to overcome cultural barriers and build trust with members quickly.
We reach members through channels that work for their personal preferences, whether that be phone calls, SMS, or face-to-face engagement—we meet members where they are, and how they want to be reached.
Reema’s technology optimizes the Guide experience as they work with members to identify and navigate resources. The navigation of resources is key, and having Guides live in the communities we serve allows for quick navigation. Beyond identifying unmet needs, Guides help activate members into various health plan initiatives and programs and help to connect them with additional plan benefits.
Reema’s commitment to developing meaningful relationships with members allows us to deliver value beyond the traditional cost savings that health plans expect. Because of the initial success of this program, the health plan leveraged Reema further to help impact one of the internal programs they were having difficulty with, further supporting the members that need the most resources, and supporting top line growth for the health plan.
Results
The primary goal of this program was to engage unreachable members, identify their needs, and connect them with resources to improve their health. As a result of Reema’s outreach, we were able to achieve:
- 84% engagement rate
- 29% fewer inpatient hospitalizations
- 2.8x improvement to medication assessment scores
- 1.7x more likely to schedule and attend their annual PCP visit
After establishing and sustaining engagement with these members, a secondary goal of this program emerged to activate these newly engaged members into additional programs through the health plan, which led to a 40% completion for do not contact, refusal, and otherwise unreachable members.
The combination of everything Reema was able to achieve on behalf of the health plan led to tremendous results, including an improvement to member experiences that ultimately boosts CAHPS scores.
