Key Takeaways
- For all experience levels. Whether you’re launching your first member engagement activity or refining an established program, this toolkit provides practical guidance tailored to your needs.
- Establishes a foundation. Before diving into activities, the toolkit helps you establish the essential groundwork for successful, sustainable member engagement.
- Provides real examples. Case studies from California managed care plans and community partners show how these strategies work in practice, offering proven approaches you can adapt.
Many health plan leaders have had the experience of investing significant resources into a program and finding that the people they intended to serve are “hard to engage.” As frustrating and wasteful as this experience may be, it is also avoidable. When health plans view members with complex care needs as hard to engage, it is often because they have not thought through the program from the member’s perspective. To be effective, programs and policies must be built around what is important to members, rather than around only what is important to plans.
Partnering with members requires first recognizing and valuing the expertise members gain through their own lived experience. Incorporating this member expertise into program and policy design can help program designers make better decisions and ultimately improve member outcomes.
The toolkit includes a 10-step plan for crafting successful engagement activities, with case studies on recruiting members with lived experience and turning their insights into long-term, actionable solutions. The goal is to improve the member’s experience with Medi-Cal and to improve health outcomes.
In addition to the toolkit, the accompanying Strengthening Member Experience: Additional Tools for Engaging People with Complex Needs is also available for download below. It contains frameworks with examples and other tools to help managed care plans put the toolkit into action.
