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This is Haley Recker with the Becker's Payer
podcast, and we are recording live at the
Becker's third annual spring pair issues roundtable.
I am thrilled today to be joined by
Sherry Johnson,
vice president of member enrollment and billing at
UCare.
Sherry, thank you so much for being here
with me today. Can you go ahead and
tell us a little bit about yourself and
your background? Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks, Hailey. I'm so
excited to be here on my very first
podcast.
So let me tell you a little bit
about UCare. UCare, we are a nonprofit
regional health plan based out of Minneapolis,
Minnesota.
We have around 600,000
members, and our lines of business include Medicare,
Medicaid,
and marketplace.
And my role at UCare is leading what
I like to call front end operations. So
the member enrollment and premium billing teams are
the teams that report to me.
Well, awesome. Thank you so much for introducing
that to us.
So today, I wanna have a discussion about
member satisfaction, which is essential to thrive in
today's competitive health care landscape.
So what experience or engagement strategies have proven
effective for your organization, and how are you
measuring success?
Thanks for that question.
Being in front end operations,
it's really challenging
because we are not in a space
where we necessarily
can positively
impact the member experience. When someone enrolls, they
expect that to go well.
When they get their premium bill, they expect
that to be right. So, sadly,
oftentimes,
we are in a position where we can
negatively
impact the experience
more so than positively.
So we have to look for different ways
to listen to our members and take into
consideration
the things that they are asking for. And
what I found has been most impactful
is in the area
of payment types.
So we found a few years ago that
our members really wanted to pay their premium
by credit card, and they wanted to use
American Express, which we didn't take at the
time.
I live in Minneapolis.
That's a Delta hub. People wanted their Delta
miles. And so we took that information, and
we decided to offer American Express as a
payment type.
And in order to measure was that effective,
we were able to look at how many
people actually use that credit card, and it
was not surprising, very high as people had
asked for that. So that was a really
nice,
benefit.
We also had a situation
where people would call into customer service maybe
the day their premium was due
and ask to pay by phone. We did
not have that option available for people.
So we talked about it. We worked with
our bank, and we implemented
a pay by phone solution.
And, again, we measured that by looking at
how many people actually
utilize that payment method.
And we thought it would be quite small
because the technology was a little clunky where
you had to enter
the credit card number and your member number
and all of that. You had to enter
it using the keypad. It didn't have a
voice response option.
But,
surprisingly,
people use that pay by phone option
like you couldn't believe, especially as it got
close to the time the payment was due.
So that was another example of how the
member feedback
really changed what we did. And then the
final thing I'll say is we implemented some
new technology
for our marketplace line of business.
And using the portal, our members were able
to do recurring payments with their credit card.
Again, something we didn't have,
but something members had asked for. And upon
implementation,
it was wildly successful.
And now we have quite a significant
part of our population who actually has all
of their
payments
prescheduled.
Well, thank you so much for going into
such great detail and sharing your experience with
us.
Once again, this is Haley Recker with the
Becker's Payer podcast recorded live at the Becker's
third annual spring payer issues roundtable.
Sherry, thank you so much. Thank you.