Marketing Select Care

In order to market a managed care plan more successfully, you may not ever need to hire additional FTEs. Since Projected Enrollment is far below the forecasted level for the targeted time period, the executive director and marketing team of current salespeople should begin to look at their competitive landscape and current market situation to assess their already existing marketing plan and analyze how they should modify it.

Evolutionary marketing evaluates how a product or service is changing market position and how to increase its market share or revenues based on the changing scenarios of the market landscape. For example, if the original plan targeted wealthy individuals and it was before the recession occurred, they might have needed to change their price and market plan to cater to more individuals to meet their target enrollment given the changing climate of the market around them.

As a managed care plan, the company should first decide who their consumers are and how to market to these different consumers. To do this, we should first identify what enrollees want from their plan. Researching motivation would be a good first step to help tell us what features consumers are looking for in their managed care plan. This could be performed through surveys of both enrollees and non-enrollees and small marketing experiments to help tell us if there is a gap in coverage or if the plan is not appealing to the interests and needs of our targeted market and consumers.

A managed care plan should also concentrate on physician acceptance of the managed care plan enrollees as patients. Since patients will often already be loyal to their physician, the chances of them changing plans to a plan that does not include their physician might be slim. In essence, physician acceptance of the plan is directly correlated to plan enrollment. Their main product is the services they enable enrollees to access, and therefore physician acceptance is necessary to provide their highest quality product. To help stimulate physician buy-in the plan might focus on offering novel types of easy billing methods which eliminate any potential headaches for both their physician and patients as consumers of the plan.

After this, the managed care plan should concentrate on the other 3 Ps – Their promotion of the plan, the price of the plan, and the place of the plan. If the managed care plan is targeted to a specific market demographic such as the "healthy, wealthy, and wise" they should evaluate how large the demographic of this is and see if they had an unfeasible projected enrollment in the target time period. Then they should evaluate what these consumers want most out of the plan and see if this has changed within this time period. This market group is more likely to purchase higher deductible insurance with a higher premium if it provides access to higher quality care and opportunities such as nutritional consults and