Daily engagement isn't a fantasy. It's the key to closing care gaps

Imagine a world where high-risk members are not just compliant with their treatment plans but actively engaged with their health every single day. Imagine they want to use a health app in the same way they use Instagram or TikTok.

Sounds too good to be true, right? But it's not just a dream—it's a reality that can be achieved with the right approach and tools. In this article, we'll explore how to achieve engagement with high-risk members that is 1) daily and 2) proactive, and how that can close gaps in care.

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Why Daily Engagement Matters

Traditional care management often involves sporadic interactions—maybe a phone call or a visit every few weeks. But for high-risk members, this usually isn't enough. Why?

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Members need consistent, daily engagement to stay on track with their treatment plans because this is the frequency on which their health tasks occur.‍

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Let's take Jason, our hypothetical Medicaid member with type 2 diabetes, hypertension and depression. His treatment plan requires medications morning and evening, checking his blood glucose twice a day, regularly monitoring his blood pressure and going for a short daily walk. On top of that there's attending appointments, refilling medications, and weekly therapy. Jason needs daily touchpoints to keep him motivated and to ensure he stays adherent to his complicated regime. Critically these need to be daily touchpoints he enjoys, rather than ones that feel like nagging.

Digital health has been promising this kind of engagement for years. "When healthcare is on a member’s phone, you can reach them at scale every day." This constant connection complements traditional care management, which often operates on a weeks-to-months timeline and may not be accessible to all members.

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Why Proactive Engagement Matters

The second important part of engagement is that is it proactive. This means that the person chose to initiate and complete a task that is beneficial to their health, like taking their medications or measuring their weight. Too often "engagement" is measured in tasks that don't make a difference, like unanswered coaching calls, SMS messages, push notifications, a cursory app open or an opened email.

That means creating a solution that our Medicaid member, Jason, actually wants to use in the same way he wants to use social media.

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The Challenges of Daily and Proactive Touchpoints

While the idea of daily engagement sounds great, making it work in practice is challenging. How do you ensure that high-risk members, who are often overwhelmed and struggling to prioritize their health, want to engage with your solution every day?

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Designing Solutions for High-Risk Members

First, it's crucial to design solutions specifically for high-risk members. This means understanding that these individuals often have multiple chronic conditions, low health literacy, and may not respond well to traditional health education. But this doesn't mean they're unreachable.

Simple, engaging digital solutions that incorporate gamification, social motivation, competition, and financial rewards are highly effective. These engagement tools don't rely on high health motivation or educational levels: they are just intrinsically fun for all people.

It's also important to leverage multiple motivational tools to cut through to your hardest-to-reach members. Everyone is motivated differently, so relying on only one motivating idea (like giving financial rewards for outcomes) will only resonate with a subset of members. You need to utilize a range of different behavioral tools.

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Personalizing Solutions

Secondly, solutions need to be as personalized as the people they help. This means supporting a wide range of chronic conditions—from diabetes to cardiovascular and respiratory issues—as well as behavioral health conditions, all within one solution. It also means the solution should  'learn' about the user over time and personalize content accordingly. For example, if a person is highly engaged by a leaderboard but shows little interest in health tracking, they should receive more competition-based content.

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The Flywheel Effect of Daily Touchpoints

Here's the great part: once you have a member’s attention every day, you can use that valuable time to motivate them to change their behavior. This is where the "flywheel" effect comes into play: once members are engaged for reason A, it's easier to get them to engage in other health-promoting behaviors B and C.

For example, members might initially engage to earn a reward for taking their medication. Once they're engaged, it’s easy to prompt them to schedule a diabetes screening or complete a health risk assessment (HRA). The key is to present these behaviors at a time when members are already engaged and find the actions fun and worthwhile. This is the "flywheel" effect that is achieved with very high engagement, which is key to addressing a range of gaps in care.

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Daily, Proactive Engagement and Perx

At Perx Health, our mission has always been to turn health management into something members actually look forward to. The idea of checking your phone and being excited to take your medication, go for a walk, or complete a health assessment sounds unreal, but it's what we've achieved. Some of the key engagement results we are most proud of are:

• 4.5 average app sessions per day - Members want to come back every day to use Perx
• 75% of members use the app every day
• 220 days of engagement on average - That's 44x longer than the health industry average!

The effect of all that engagement? High adherence to health tasks that improves multiple quality measures across HEDIS, CAHPs and Part C and D Stars measures.

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At Perx Health, we’ve turned daily health check-ins into a habit that members love. By making every interaction fun and rewarding, we've transformed proactive health engagement from a chore into a choice. It's not just about reaching members—it's about inspiring them to reach for better health, every single day.

Ready to learn more? Reach out to us at hello@perxhealth.com and ask how Perx can customize a program to close gaps with your populations.

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