The Healthcare Reform Act will forever alter the landscape for how Individuals make healthcare choices and for how Insurance providers engage and interact in the decision-making process. Beginning January 1, 2014, only those Insurance providers who embrace dramatic change across their organizations as a result of this legislation will be in position to reap the benefits of consumer-directed healthcare choice.

While many of these changes will be most prominently seen from a marketing perspective, the reforms will require much deeper action when you consider:

• the risk of guaranteed issue and renewability with individual and employer mandates.
• the market dynamic and pressure on pricing from the creation of health insurance exchanges and co-ops.
• how minimum coverage mandates with tightly controlled premiums will create product design issues.  
• the effect that a lack of meaningful medical reimbursement reform will have in the face of continually-rising medical costs,  while insurers face mandated medical loss ratio (MLR) levels.

Merkle believes these transformational events will bring huge opportunities for those companies who move swiftly to adapt to these system-wide changes, while embracing the need to implement a direct-to-consumer marketing model for acquisition and retention efforts.

Merkle is uniquely positioned to partner with these forward-thinking organizations by combining vast professional experience in the healthcare space with our rich data-driven analytic heritage, deep industry experience and quality creative services. As a result, health insurance clients recognize us as critical partners for:

• Enterprise segmentation to guide strategy and unlock customer value
• Integrated Media Optimization to deploy media in an efficient, coordinated way
• Digital marketing thought leadership and execution
• Highly productive acquisition and lead generation
• Data innovation to zero in on your targets
• Retention and loyalty initiatives with quantified value
• Multi-channel campaigns using online and offline media
• Creative concept, development, production and execution of multi-channel marketing campaigns
• Marketing infrastructure strategy and requirements
• Change management

Our disciplined, analytic approach to marketing allows healthcare insurance companies to improve marketing effectiveness, open new channels of communication, drive leads and acquisition, retain more profitable members and drive greater accountability across the organization.