CR I S I S R E S PON S E
Calling with care
When your health is threatened, you need your health plan to be more than just a card in your wallet.
The COVID-19 pandemic presented an immediate threat to our members, customers, providers, business partners, and nonprofit organizations that provide vital services in our communities. Our stakeholders were counting on us, and we couldn’t let them down. Our priority was to support our most vulnerable members. Within two weeks of the national emergency declaration on March 13, our nurses began calling members over age 80 with three or more risk factors for COVID-19. We asked how they were and what they needed, and we connected those with needs to resources such as mail-order prescription delivery, transportation, mental health care, and community services.
The calls were often emotional. One member told our case manager she was the first person he’d spoken to in weeks. Many others told us they were grateful their health plan truly cared about them. Expanding our reach With our operational model in place, we rapidly expanded the calling program. In total, we reached out to 141,000 at-risk members across nine states, including those who worked in essential settings like nursing homes and meatpacking plants. We also worked with our health care system partners, like Waconia, Minn.-based Ridgeview, to reach thousands more of our shared members. We identified at-risk enrollees in our accountable care organization (ACO) plans and equipped our provider partners with a needs assessment tool and community-specific resource lists. Erica Schuler, RN, Ridgeview’s director of ACO and value-based care, called dozens of patients. “As we rapidly adjusted our hospital and clinic operations for the pandemic, we just didn’t have extra IT resources to identify patients for outreach,” she says.
“It’s good to know someone out there really cares about us.”
Medica member who received a COVID-19 outreach call
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