There’s a reason numerous health insurance plans are digitizing the care management experience. Traditional care management programs can only reach a portion of member populations. They face challenges in identifying and addressing barriers to care. Plus, it’s difficult to reach and engage members by telephone alone.

When organizations implement a digital care management approach, they can shift member support from intermittent to continuous and enable care teams to practice at the top of their license. But successful digital transformation goes beyond incorporating software tools into your workflow.

“Digital adoption,” is often misunderstood to mean that an organization uses digital tools as part of its day-to-day operations. But if health plans are not positioned to get the most out of their digital health management platforms, they miss out on driving more substantial cost savings, operational efficiencies, and improved member outcomes. To realize program ROI, health plan leaders must prioritize an implementation strategy that ensures true digital adoption: the ability of members and staff to leverage new technology to its full potential.

Health plans who yield the greatest results from a digital care management approach follow these proven steps to align people, processes and technology.

Ensure a speedy and effective go-to-market by aligning around your goals and a shared vision of success for the digital initiative. Consider the long-term business outcomes you aim to achieve, such as market growth and retention, improved or appropriate utilization, better quality performance, improved member satisfaction, and service line and IT transformation. 

Successful plans focus on quickly launching their digital solution to one to two groups or populations, learning from that initial launch, and investing accordingly to engage larger populations.

As many health plans will agree, it’s not enough to simply offer a digital health management platform. Organizations must actively recruit members into the program to ensure adoption and keep members engaged in a way that’s valuable to them. But you simply cannot scale digital member adoption through telephonic recruitment alone.

Leverage your marketing team’s insights on reaching and engaging more people in different ways, through digital channels such as email. To make sure your outreach is relevant to the member, target your marketing campaigns to key events along the member’s healthcare journey, such as open enrollment. At each touchpoint, it’s crucial to ensure your messaging will resonate with the segments and personas you’re targeting by first speaking to the member’s needs and challenges while avoiding terminology they may not understand. 

Helping members make the most of new digital health tools is only one part of the equation. It’s equally critical to ensure frontline staff can use technology investments efficiently and effectively to achieve program ROI. 

Motivate teams to shift to a digital-first mindset so staff can rethink their workflow and focus. To incentivize teams and hold individuals accountable, institute digital performance metrics—that don’t compete with telephonic metrics—as part of your standard evaluations for team members. Help each staff member practice at the top of their license by shifting member recruitment and onboarding to non-clinical staff. Most importantly: executive leaders must hold teams accountable to their digital goals, digest feedback as the program progresses, and determine ways to improve.

To maximize digital adoption, you must iteratively test, learn, and optimize at each stage of this proven implementation process. But putting new goals and practices into place requires regular enforcement to ensure long-term results. This means that health plans leaders must engage at each step to ensure meaningful digital adoption.