October 1, 2019, marks the beginning of a new era for Mary Washington Healthcare and the Mary Washington Health Alliance. For on this day, we will begin marketing our own health plan: Mary Washington Medicare Advantage (MWMA). This is an HMO-type plan for Medicare beneficiaries offering many advantages over traditional Medicare FFS. These include zero-added premium, prescription drug coverage, vision, hearing and dental benefits and a cap on annual out-of-pocket spend. Based on the generous plan design, low cost and the fact that the Alliance physicians are designated as the in-network providers, this product will be very competitive with other Medicare Advantage (MA) plans in our market. Because of this and the fact that MA penetration in our region is relatively low (11% compared to the national average of 31%), we are looking forward to a successful roll-out of this plan during this year’s Annual Enrollment Period (AEP). Individuals eligible for Medicare will be able to sign up with MWMA between October 15^th and December 7^th.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

1. There will be an aggressive marketing campaign designed to educate our Medicare-age and soon-to-be-Medicare-age individuals in our service area. Obviously, they need to be aware of the existence of this plan before they can sign up with it. Once your patients find out about it, they will be asking you about MWMA. While you can’t actively promote the plan over competing plans, you can say things like: “Our practice does participate in this plan and I encourage you to find out more about it” or “I think that this would be a good plan for you”.
2. Cooperate with our marketing team, allowing them to place educational materials about the MWMA plan in your office.
3. Become familiar with the options your patients will have to find out more about MWMA so you can direct them to those resources (the toll free number they can call (855-919-0826), the MWMA website (MWMAplan.com,) the insurance brokers they can meet with and the schedule of educational events in our community).

COME JANUARY 2020

Starting on Thursday January 2, 2020, patients will be registering at your office check-in areas with their new MWMA insurance cards. Please reward their loyalty and trust in our new health plan with exemplary service. Be especially attentive to coding appropriately, closing gaps in preventative care and providing timely access to your services when requested. As this is our very own health plan, our patients, our providers, our network and our community all stand to benefit from this new commitment to delivering high quality, cost-effective care to our Medicare population. Details as to how our success in this new program can impact physician distributions will be forthcoming. As this is our own health plan without any intermediary, monitoring of performance will be closer to real-time and performance will be more closely related to compensation than ever before. So, provide your best care and stay tuned.