Member retention

It's a simple set of five letters, but it can pay big dividends when you're interacting with patients.

Let's spell it out and communicate our best.

Acknowledge—The first letter of the AIDET acronym reminds each staff member or care provider along the patient’s path to acknowledge his or her presence. Making eye contact with a patient or giving the member a smile is all that’s needed.

Introduce—When you identify yourself by name, you change the patient’s visit from an anonymous interaction into a personalized experience.

Duration—A little information goes a long way. Letting patients know how long a visit is expected to take lets them know their time is valued. If a doctor is running late or the lab is behind, letting patients know about the delay and keeping them updated shows respect.

Explanation—Whose body is it? No one likes it when a caregiver starts doing something without telling a patient what they’re doing and why.

Thank you—The last step wraps up the visit by thanking the patient for coming in or for providing the information needed to provide them with excellent care.

Good things happen when more members join Kaiser Permanente.

Kaiser Permanente and our unions gain strength and stability. Good jobs become more available and secure. More people in our communities benefit from KP’s affordable, quality care.

And all KP employees can help make those things happen.

For example, the Labor Management Partnership and KP’s sales and marketing organization work together in unique ways to build KP health plan membership. Thanks to their efforts, in 2014:

• 125,000 KP members joined or stayed with the health plan. 
• 100,000 KP members or potential members got letters from their local unions encouraging them to select KP during open enrollment.
• KP union ambassadors reached 20,000 potential KP members at worksite, community and union events in five regions.

Workers tell their story

In addition, thousands of KP workers, managers and physicians in unit-based teams win and keep KP members by delivering great care and service every day.

Louise Casa, a nurse practitioner, UFCW Local 400 member and union ambassador in the Mid-Atlantic States, says all workers have stories to tell about what makes KP a better place to give and get care.

“I share the story of being part of a partnership that values union workers and their ideas,” she says. “I talk about our unit-based team work on goals for care improvement, problem solving and workflow improvement in our departments. People in the community been very interested in the UBT process.”

What you can do

Everyone has a role to play in helping Kaiser Permanente grow and retain its membership. It starts with the work we do every day to serve members and patients:

• Deliver the best member experience. If you know someone is a new member, take an extra minute to explain how things work.
• Encourage members to sign up for kp.org. Surveys show that members who sign on are more likely to stay with Kaiser Permanente.
• Look for ways to improve work processes or cut waste, to help keep KP affordable for the people we serve.

Close to 5,800 KP members in the Mid-Atlantic States get their Kaiser Permanente coverage through SEIU 32BJ, a regional union representing building service workers. Many of them speak English as their second language. To help this group get the most for their health care dollars, KP and 32BJ kicked off a campaign in April and May to educate and engage new 32BJ union members.

Maria Naranjo, deputy director, SEIU 32BJ Capital Area District, led the campaign with the help of Brenda Muñoz, labor liaison and analyst, KP Office of Labor Management Partnership. The field team included two 32BJ staff members and seven 32BJ members (four were bilingual). Of the seven 32BJ members, six already were KP members who could share their own experiences with KP.

“We want 32BJ members to be champions of health and KP in their workplace—and to do this, they need to understand their plan coverage and how KP works,” says Muñoz.

Team hits the field

The team visited close to 300 worksites and collected more than 1,100 names and phone numbers of members they spoke with. In addition, 32BJ sent 5,000 text messages and KP’s Regional Access Services staff placed more than 2,600 outreach calls to help members choose a physician, make appointments, identify health needs and learn about an upcoming heath fair. The goal was to provide as many touch points as possible by contacting members via mail, phone and in-person visits.

At the end of the campaign, Kaiser Permanente and 32BJ hosted a health fair at the D.C. Convention Center. It was the first time 32BJ partnered with a health plan to host a health fair. More than 100 32BJ members and family members attended and were offered free health screenings for blood pressure, BMI, glucose and total cholesterol.

Attendees also had a chance to meet with a KP physician, enroll in My Health Manager, select a primary care physician, make future appointments, ask questions and learn more about the KP system. Additional resources at the fair included workplace safety tips, healthy lunch tips and answers on health plan benefit questions. SEIU 32BJ was impressed with the health fair, which got positive feedback from attendees.

Creating value for members

Throughout the campaign, the team learned a lot about KP’s SEIU 32BJ members and their needs. The team identified several areas for improvement, and it is determining how to continue to engage these members through workshops, further education, health fairs and promotion of preventive health.

“SEIU 32BJ is a potential growth area,” Muñoz says. “In order to retain these members and encourage growth, we must provide the resources they need to show them that KP is not only committed to providing them with high-quality health care, but that we can provide culturally competent care.”

An earlier version of this story appeared in Inside KP Mid-Atlantic States, July 2, 2014.

With changes this fall promising to bring more health care coverage to millions of Americans—and many more members to Kaiser Permanente—unit-based teams are helping to get member services in top shape.

Managing diseases, slashing wait times and cutting out the high cost of waste are naturally on the radar for caregivers’ UBTs. But operations teams also are working behind the scenes to make sure our services are seamless.

For instance, one team at the California Service Center in San Diego is working to make sure new members have a good “onboarding” experience. Its project aims to make sure that what an employer purchases for its employees is what those workers get when they show up at a medical center for the first time, ID cards in hand. No one wants a new member arriving at a Kaiser Permanente facility and being asked to fork out an unexpected copayment or, worse, being denied a service outright.

“This is the kind of solution that is—and should be—generated from the front line,” says Demetria Williams, a service center manager and the Contract team’s management co-lead.

KP's dual role

Kaiser Permanente is unusual in that we provide both insurance coverage and health care, and so how administrative services are handled affect a member’s overall impression of the organization. The Contracts team enrolls employer groups, entering the details of the lengthy contracts—copay amounts, covered medicines, vision care allowances and so on—that will apply to every employee covered by that particular contract. That sets the stage for the individual employee’s enrollment with Kaiser Permanente. If it’s all done correctly, everything goes smoothly when the new member arrives at one of our facilities.

The job is tough. About 18 account administration representatives refer to the signed contracts they’ve received from Sales and Account managers as they enroll a new employer group—or update an existing one—so the employees will get the right services. The account administration representatives contact the sales people when they find inconsistencies—when, say, the plan that was selected doesn’t include vision coverage, even though the associated contract calls for it.

“We would pick up the phone, but we were not connecting,” Williams says. “We were speaking different languages. We didn’t know what they wanted; they didn’t see what we saw.”

Despite the meticulous work, the team faced a 65 percent discrepancy rate—entries that are likely to cause problems for members when they seek care. So the Contracts UBT used the plan, do, study, act steps to track where the data was misaligned and trace it to specific parts of the process—and team members decided on a small test of change, hosting a “Day in the Life of a Contract” with members of the Sales and Marketing team.

Part of the difficulty was that sales managers and service reps work on different computer systems, with no connection between them. The competing systems were a swamp of alphabet stew: CIDARS, LOB, PA. Since merging the two systems into one isn’t in the offing, staff members found a solution at the unit-based team level.

Cutting through jargon

During two days of face-to-face meetings, the two sides cut through the sea of baffling acronyms and buzzwords and created a cheat sheet of common, acceptable codes.

Jeannie Athey, the Contract team’s union co-lead, an account administration representative for nine years and an OPEIU Local 30 member, said the UBT project was like a foreign student exchange. “We hadn’t seen their system before,” she says—and it was eye opening.

It’s too soon to have updated metrics, but Athey says anecdotal reports indicate the reps need fewer phone consults with sales managers and there has been less frustration between the two groups.

“Members can’t be enrolled until we’ve done our job of setting up the group contract,” says Sherri Saunders, the service center’s operations manager and the team’s sponsor. “If they’re not enrolled, they can’t get services. The contracts are legal documents. We have to get them right the first time, for our members.”