Helping clients digitally enroll in Medicare
The current business model for Fidelity Medicare Services relies heavily on time- and cost-intensive 1-on-1 meetings between clients and advisors to complete the full enrollment process. In these meetings, our advisors educate clients about the intricacies of Medicare, while also gathering relevant information about the client’s personal situation. They then use that information to help choose the right plan and enroll.
In order to scale the business, we know that we will need a more efficient digital solution to more effectively enroll clients and help cut down on the expenses of these 1-on-1 meetings. Last fall, I collaborated with our VP of Product and Head of Medicare Services to figure out what an ideal solution would look like for a user to enroll in Medicare fully digitally on their own.
My Role
UI/UX Design and Prototyping
Tools
Figma
Why digital enrollment
Customers aged 65 and over are becoming more comfortable with digital platforms. They understand the convenience and efficiency of having the information and choices at their own fingertips, and thus an increasing proportion of the Medicare population is willing to embrace online tools. In a poll of 2,500 current Medicare beneficiaries, 83% said they had no trust concerns when it comes to e-commerce. Plus, we often hear in our user studies that beneficiaries are discouraged by traditional enrollment models that include snail mail or pushy sales agents.
Challenges
In the industry, the percentage of individuals enrolling in Medicare plans online entirely is less that 7%. From our research, we know this is due to a few major reasons:
Users have too much choice. The average beneficiary in 2022 had 39 Medicare Advantage plans to choose from and we’ve seen that number increase year over year.
Users have a general lack of confidence when selecting a Medicare plan. And with so much choice out there, who can blame them? Customers have told us that direct confirmation with an expert is currently critical for them to feel confident that they are making the correct choices.
Overall lack of trust. Last year alone, the Center for Medicare Services (CMS) received almost 40,000 complaints regarding predatory marketing of Medicare plans.
Our solution would seek to guide a user through a Medicare plan shopping UX in a way that instills confidence, trust, and provides personalized guidance and recommendations to meet all kinds of individual needs.
Similar experiences
Before putting pen to paper, I investigated some similar experiences that attempted to crack the digital enrollment problem—with varying degrees of success.
Both Chapter and Fair Square Medicare are 3rd party broker sites that are leveraging digital tools to enroll people in Medicare. Certainly elements that worked well integrated nicely into our ideation process, and those that didn’t also provided a counterpoint against which we could improve.
Mapping out a trustworthy experience
Next, I began to play out what a Fidelity Medicare end-to-end digital experience might look like. In order to temper client skepticism and lack of trust, I wanted to make sure that our experience would ask the right questions and display the right information in the right context. I held meetings with our Medicare sales team to ensure that all of the right Medicare topics, rules, and comparisons were covered throughout.
Decision framework
What emerged from this work was what we internally called the “Big Three Questions” framework:
When can I enroll? Should I stay on my employer plan at 65? Should I stay on my employer coverage? How can I avoid potential penalties?
When should I enroll in Medicare?
1.
What kind of Medicare coverage is right for me?
2.
Do I need to enroll in an extra plan? What if I travel for part of the year? Do I need drug coverage if I’m not taking drugs now? Will I need to get referrals to see my Doctors or specialists?
Are my drugs covered? Is my doctor in network? Is my pharmacy preferred? What will my co-insurance costs be?
3.
Which plan should I enroll in?
Prototype
Utilizing our new decision framework, I created a Figma prototype that simulated a full end-to-end experience from the earliest moments of Medicare onboarding all the way to shopping and pricing of plans.
The experience was mostly comprised of questions to help us understand more about the individuals personal Medicare situation. Based on their responses, the prototype would generate different recommendations like which enrollment windows the individual should take advantage of, as well as determine whether a Medicare Advantage plan or a Medicare Supplement plan would best suit their needs.
Research
To get the most useful feedback, we conducted moderated testing sessions with recruits age 64–80 years who were planning to enroll in Medicare that year. Our sessions were about an hour long and were conducted over zoom. We had the recruits share their screens so we could follow along as they navigated the prototype.
Findings
Users found our prototype easy to use and felt the information was relevant and well-organized.
1
The simplicity of the three-question approach allowed us to effectively address the key concerns of users who were completely new to Medicare as well as those who had already answered one or more of the questions and could jump in where they needed more information.
2
There were opportunities to educate users throughout the experience, not just at the outset.
3
Users preferred a chat feature that was handled by a real human rather than a virtual assistant.
4
Login should be optional and only encouraged after the information has been given, rather than required in order to continue. The design of this engagement along with the chat feature significantly affected whether users felt they could trust the platform or not.
5
A place to start: choosing a pharmacy
Now that we knew our prototype was on the right track, I collaborated with our Product and Engineering teams to determine a good plan of attack for such a large development effort. Together we decided that the “choosing a pharmacy” capability was a good place to start. It would be useful to the overall business even beyond this tool, and it had some tricky UI components to be tackled such as searching capabilities, an interactive map, and the ability to allow users to select multiple pharmacies in a “My Pharmacies” list. We learned it was important to allow users to select multiple pharmacies as some prescriptions may be cheaper depending on whether or not the pharmacy is “preferred”.
In addition to the pharmacy list, we also included additional capabilities like filtering by distance, the ability to hide and show the map, displaying location accessibility information, as well as the option to include mail-order pharmacies along with brick-and-mortar pharmacies.
To build out the interface, I leveraged Fidelity’s enterprise design system while also creating new components as needed within the same design language. When preparing Figmas for developer handoff, I always like to leave space for descriptions, and I try to play out all possible interactions and scenarios to make life easier for our engineering team.
This project is ongoing, with the pharmacy selection portion of the experience in development now. I’ve also begun to design the provider selection interface. We hope to have the tool live and rolling out to actual users within the Fidelity client ecosystem by early next year.