CMS and HHS ACA Enrollment
Role: I developed and led this project.
Client’s Prompt:
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is the primary implementer of the Health Insurance Exchanges under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. CMS asked us to help them better coordinate how and where their marketing resources ought to be directed in order to increase enrollments.
What we produced:
A series of data visualizations that helped agency leadership clearly see opportunities for growth and make inferences on the types of marketing and outreach channels that would make sense for particular media markets.
Our approach:
We prototyped a large set of data visualizations that might be possible assuming that we could collect the data that we needed from a multitude of siloed organizations, (e.g., national media purchasing group vs. enrollment data collection group vs. the group that managed the political and surrogate appearances), presenting and narrowing the possibilities via a series of visits and user feedback sessions with data owners.
The key insight:
After running a scaled-down process and interface, user feedback indicated that we could not ignore the tool’s utility as a reporting mechanism; some of our potential users primarily used the tool to communicate progress to their leadership. Other data owners preferred the tools as means for helping to advise and strategize media spend with decision-makers. Thus, usability and value propositions differed depending on the type of user (which we defined as political vs. strategic).
What’s resulted:
We further designed and implemented a lightweight data wrangling and visualization process (via Tableau) that would enable our strategists to better decide where to deploy media and other marketing resources that might encourage citizens to register and check for better insurance policies and/or subsidies. Our users, analysts in the HHS Office of Planning and Evaluation, used our tool to advise our CMS colleagues on national media spend, where to send political surrogates and where to seek earned media.
