Prior to 2022, the plan relied upon an external vendor to build, automate, launch and report on campaigns across its 1.5 million member base.
Developing engagement-centered campaigns relied upon the vendor’s technical team and often came at a cost to IEHP—both financial and in terms of time. The plan needed a more reliable way to communicate timely, integrated, and engaging messages across multiple campaigns to increase member awareness, compliance, and adherence to important quality initiatives.
An additional challenge centered around maintaining IEHP members’ and providers’ demographics, such as addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and marital or employment status. This information changes constantly, making it difficult for IEHP to manage the volumes of returned physical mail sent back through the U.S. Post Office. Correcting this was both costly and time-consuming as it required manually reaching out to the members and providers whose mail had been returned to identify their correct current addresses.
IEHP sought a way to automate communications and improve the experience for all persons and organizations it interacted with. Ushur presented a proof of concept of interactive, digital self-service to connect with members and providers and enable them to access and update their demographics when they changed, in real time, improving engagement, accuracy and operational efficiency.
Ushur was selected through the Request for Proposal (RFP) process and asked to build two strategic communications strategies.
The plan required that Ushur deploy secure two-way conversations with its members and providers. Ushur’s technology removed the need for the cumbersome added step of asking members to go from text message to an online portal, which had previously impacted engagement and completion of requested actions. Ushur’s Invisible App provided a HIPAA-secure channel to protect information collected from providers and members.
Previously, business users across many IEHP departments relied upon the marketing team and the vendor to build campaigns. By training and certifying internal business users on Ushur’s No Code Platform, IEHP was able to accelerate campaign development by having “citizen developer” business users create campaigns, while helping its technical professionals focus on their core responsibilities.
Today, IEHP and Ushur continue to collaborate on communication automation projects across many IEHP departments and focus areas. From outreach to members to set up annual health exams with physicians, to diabetes educational campaigns, to reminding members to register their newborns and schedule wellness exams for their children, IEHP has the tools to improve provider and member experiences and satisfaction and health-quality outcomes.
Looking forward, IEHP will continue to streamline member and provider engagement and automate more processes. With the current technological foundation in place, IEHP has a dynamic tool to continue the outreach and improve the impact with its membership community.