Case Study: How Member Education and Engagement Guided Smarter Care Choices for a 2.6x ROI

Executive Summary

As the platform to simplify healthcare, Vālenz Health® offers solutions to support health plans in optimizing the cost, quality, and utilization of care for everyone.

A grocery chain in the Southwest partnered with Valenz for an innovative member engagement strategy that would guide smarter care choices to reduce overall plan spend.

Using a personalized communication strategy, Valenz Bluebook educated employees on in-network price variances, enabling them to make value-based healthcare decisions that delivered a program return on investment of 2.6:1 in the first year of implementation.

Challenge

A family-owned retail grocery chain in the Southwest with a large workforce of hourly employees sought creative ways to control growing medical spend without shifting too much of the financial burden to employees.

To complicate matters, a large percentage of employees only spoke Spanish and had little computer literacy, meaning health plan education had to be primarily conducted via mail.

Prior to the partnership with Valenz Bluebook, the client’s best line of defense against rising healthcare costs was to stress to employees the importance of choosing in-network providers.

After Valenz Bluebook demonstrated how in-network provider costs could vary as much as 600%, the client knew they needed a better strategy to encourage employees to make smarter, more cost-efficient healthcare choices.

Solution

Using the Engagement Rewards feature, Valenz Bluebook worked with the client to create a direct mail campaign tailored to each employee demographic.

Employees received fun postcards and open enrollment packages demonstrating the simplicity of the Valenz Bluebook “green-yellow-red" methodology, which highlighted the high-value, low-cost care options available within the members’ network.

Every time an employee received a postcard or information about Valenz Bluebook via mail, program utilization increased as members began to shop for care. At the same time, detailed analytics allowed the client to view changes in healthcare shopping behavior as it occurred.

Results

As employees learned to use Valenz Bluebook to identify and schedule high-value care, more chose to receive care from “green”-labeled providers, resulting in direct savings for both members and the plan.

In the first year of implementation, the personalized strategy from Valenz Bluebook boosted average member program utilization rates to 10%, supporting cost savings in care choices that ultimately delivered a 2.6:1 return on investment for the client.