3 ways an exercise-as-engagement platform can help your quality strategy
This year’s Star Ratings release saw Stars decreasing across all MA-PD contracts for the third straight year. In 2022, some 68% of contracts were rated 4 stars or higher; that number stands at 40% with the 2025 release.
Falling Stars means falling revenues. Failure to achieve a score of 4 or higher can cost plans hundreds of millions of dollars in qualified bonus payments. In addition, plans with higher Star Ratings are more attractive to members, with 5-star plans even able to enroll new members year round.
As you hone your strategies to improve Stars performance and plan for new investments and partners, exercise is often left out of the conversation. By and large, traditional fitness programs for Medicare Advantage aren’t delivering results, and there are major hurdles to engagement – which, of course, has a downstream impact on outcomes, costs, and ability to truly move Stars.
But the tide is turning. Innovative Medicare Advantage plans are beginning to embrace and fully leverage evidence-based exercise platforms like Bold. Unlike traditional fitness point solutions, exercise-as-engagement platforms are designed to deliver value for your plan’s bottom line, driving quality improvements, maintaining clinical excellence, and retaining members.
In today’s cost-constrained environment, quality leaders would do well to emphasize closing your members’ exercise gaps by promoting more suitable programs that deliver long-term results.
Here are 3 ways an exercise-as-engagement platform can help your quality strategy.
1. Identifying member risk factors
Having the latest, most in-depth information about your members’ health is critical to help you drive quality and outcomes, and ensure your reporting and insights are accurate. Robust assessments baked into an exercise-as-engagement platform are aligned with clinical outcomes to identify each member’s unique needs, health histories, level of risk, pains, and existing chronic conditions or recent injuries.
Onboarding and ongoing risk assessments are foundational for exercise-as-engagement platforms to drive outcomes by:
- Ensuring members are enrolled in the right personalized programs based on their risk
- Collecting feedback and progress updates at set milestones
- Identifying and addressing any changes or additional needs from members
- Measuring outcomes
By flagging members with certain risk factors early, your exercise partner can also provide member-level insights that can support your broader Stars strategy. Your exercise partner’s assessments and reports should help your plan get closer to members and are a core part of an effective program.
2. Reinforcing plan messaging and recommended actions year-round
Timely and personalized communication with your members is core to any successful Stars strategy. An exercise solution can be a tremendous added resource to your toolkit — if it meets the mark on engagement. Bold members, for example, take an average of 18 healthy actions per month on the platform, including taking exercise classes, completing assessments and check-ins, and consuming educational resources.
All that engagement provides ample opportunity to reinforce key messaging related to your quality strategy. Your exercise solution should complement your team’s work by sending timely campaigns related to hard-to-move measures, like those derived from the Health Outcomes Survey (HOS), specific nudges that support members long-term recall, and even providing the functionality to run proxy surveys to get an early read on hard-to-move measures.
Your exercise solution’s communications may include:
- Post-class surveys and personalized, recommended next steps
- Regular touchpoints to collect member self-reported outcomes tied to HOS measures
- Email and in-app notifications to stay in touch with members about key milestones and next steps, with opportunities to bump up or reiterate plan messaging and communications
- Expert-led content delivered at key moments that educate members on key topics
- Reminders with tips on how to talk to their providers about their needs – like this printable checklist that members can use to talk with providers about bladder control
“I cannot get to an in-person class and this program always is available. There is such a wide variety of classes that I can always find one that meets my needs. The Bold Talks help me understand why I am doing the exercises and why they are so important. I've told all my doctors about the program and they can clearly see it’s helping me.” - Bold member
3. Delivering clinical impact
The close relationship between quality and clinical teams underscores the need for putting forward a solution that delivers measurable outcomes. When designed with seniors in mind, your exercise solution can be a powerful tool to help reduce falls, increase physical activity, reduce chronic pain, and even improve members’ mental health.
That many of these outcomes are also assessed via the Medicare Star Ratings program is precisely the point. An exercise-as-engagement platform like Bold helps to advance quality strategies by both educating your members about topics directly related to Stars — and then delivering an intervention that helps those same members improve their health.
In a budget-constrained world, the ability to deliver impact on multiple revenue drivers with a single solution is one of the most powerful reasons why quality leaders should consider (or reconsider) exercise as a key pillar of a successful Stars strategy.
Ready to learn more about how Bold’s exercise-as-engagement can support your plan’s quality efforts? Get in touch to find out what sets Bold apart with clinical exercise for Medicare members.