Maximize the Value of Your Member Portal: 3 Key Strategies – Part 1

Determine Goals for the Portal and Identify Champions 

The first step in effectively deploying and maintaining an online portal for your members is to ask: What does success look like, and which departments own each metric?  Setting goals requires thoughtful planning and strategic partnerships across departments, including member services, marketing, technology, and quality.  

While these goals might be championed by certain departments, you are all one team, and the health plan will benefit from contributions and collaboration across departments, regardless of ownership. Aligning on goals cross-functionally will drive operational and cost efficiencies, better care outcomes, and improved member satisfaction. 

Here at mPulse, we have worked with over 400 health plans, including 29 of the largest 30 plans in the United States. From our experience, the most successful organizations set goals related to most, if not all, of the following: 

• Member acquisition and retention 
• Portal registration 
• Paperless communication selected 
• Member utilization of key features including: 
  • ID card 
  • Provider search 
  • Viewing benefits and claims 
  • Medication management 
  • Care plan 
• Member portal mobile app downloads 
• Member enrollment in chronic care and other diagnosis-specific programs 
• Reduction in call center volume  
• Improved connection to your members, providers, distributors, and employers 

Aligning Cross-Functional Teams with Clear, Unified Portals Goals 

For health plans, creating a single, shared document that outlines cross-functional goals for the member portal can significantly reduce duplication of effort and foster stronger collaboration. When teams from across departments—such as IT, member services, marketing, and compliance—come together around a unified set of objectives, they can coordinate updates, align priorities, and complement each other’s work. This collective approach enhances efficiency and ensures that all efforts are driving toward the same overarching member experience goals. 

To further improve coordination, clarifying ownership and expectations helps each team understand their role in execution. Break down each portal-related objective into clear, measurable, and prioritized goals. This level of specificity helps maintain focus and momentum, ensuring the cross-functional portal team stays on track and can demonstrate progress effectively. 

Invite Peers, Specify Goals, and Consider a Technology Partner

It’s nearly impossible to improve your member portal goals when you don’t know what it is about your member portal that you’re specifically attempting to address. So where to start? 

First, you’ll want to pull together a group of your peers responsible for portal costs, member adoption, and member health outcomes, identifying potential changes in member behavior that would benefit both members and your organization, and estimate the projected value to your organization if your member adopted the necessary behavior change. 

Second, you also want to determine which member populations should be addressed for each goal. Member populations can be assigned to goals based on data from enrollment, medical and pharmacy claims, care plans, health risk assessments, CAHPS, appeals and grievances, and other sources of data. To help expedite this initiative, member analytics takes these sources of data to intelligently predict member patterns and identify member populations to whom to target specific initiatives tied to your member portal goals.   

Third, having identified goals, behaviors, target populations you want to support with your member portal, your team now has a clear vision that will inform conversations with potential technology providers. Choosing the right partner with whom you can grow will allow your technology to integrate better together to deliver valuable member experiences that connect both your internal operations and the entire member journey. This starts with enrolling consumers, to identifying population and member level insights and predictions, to engaging members through omnichannel outreach to support their portal usage, to offering self-service and personalized experiences in the member portal, to finishing with member re-enrollment. 

A healthcare specific technology partner like mPulse can work with you to help you add specificity and domain expertise and support you in accomplishing your goals for member portals and beyond. 

Having worked cross-functionally on your Portals Goals Document, you will be able to capture the data that measure the metrics related to each goal.  From there, your organization can more effectively track your teams’ efforts in influencing those metrics for the better.   

Maximizing the Value of Your Member Portal – Part 2 & 3 

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our 3-part series on maximizing the value of your member portal!