Covering New Ground: How Access Health CT Carved Inroads in Uncharted Territory
// By Lisa D. Ellis //
Health care marketers often look to their peers for examples to help guide their efforts to bring people in to access their programs or services. But when Access Health CT (Connecticut’s state-run health exchange) came into being in 2012 to serve as a statewide exchange making affordable health care accessible for qualified individuals and businesses through Obamacare, it was leading the way in uncharted territory. With no clear path to follow, the organization had to make things up as it went along.
Now with three years of enrollments under its belt, Access Health CT is being hailed by many experts as an exceptional model of how to get things done right. It has signed up record numbers of individuals on private insurance (providers include Anthem, ConnectiCare Benefits Inc., UnitedHealthcare, and HealthyCT) and it has also been able to transition from the federal grants initially provided to launch the operations to become fully self-sufficient through insurance plan assessments that are passed on to consumers. These successes are especially striking when you consider other state health exchanges, many of which are still struggling and are looking to Access Health CT for guidance.
In fact, with so much to celebrate in the Constitution State, others can learn from how Access Health CT approaches the tasks of attracting new members and also retaining existing ones.
The Harvard Business School (HBS) and the Harvard T.H. Chan School Public Health have even created a new class based on Access Health CT’s case study of marketing affordable health care, and AHCT’s Marketing Director attended and taught a class there recently.