IRVING, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Health Plan Alliance (Alliance), in collaboration with Faegre Drinker Consulting and the Wakely Consulting Group, is pleased to announce the launch of its Medicare Advantage Consortium (MASBC) for Plan Year (PY) 2024. MASBC PY 2024 will focus on product innovation and “Medicare Advantage (MA) strategic bid” work more broadly. As before, the Consortium will provide a forum for health plans to evaluate potential supplemental benefits for MA plans and provide resources to assist plans with implementing them. This year, the Consortium’s fourth under the Alliance, the consortium model features member-to-member collaboration among community-based MA health plans across the country, data-driven case studies from vendors specializing in supplemental benefit administration, and includes a pilot project on supplemental benefits analytics reporting, benchmarking, and analysis.
The Health Plan Alliance supports nearly 50 regional health plans in non-competing markets that work with one another and their provider networks to improve managed care in their communities. “The MASBC is consistently one of the most popular offerings within the Alliance value portfolio because it centers the connection between efforts to impact social drivers of health and achieving desired clinical outcomes,” said Kristin Rodriguez, Health Plan Alliance chief operating officer. “We anticipate this year’s Consortium will empower provider-sponsored and community-based MA plans to develop offerings that meet their communities’ needs and support their provider partners’ work.”
The MA program is rapidly growing – enrollment now tops 26 million —powered to a great extent by new supplemental benefits that improve plan attractiveness, member experience, and clinical outcomes. With Baby Boomers aging into Medicare and the COVID-19 public health emergency changing healthcare expectations, this is an especially important moment for MA plans to assess and update their benefits strategy.
“The Consortium’s value proposition is very simple. Members gain access to more new ideas and expertise collectively than any one plan would ever purchase individually,” said Mike Adelberg, principal at Faegre Drinker Consulting and a former senior MA regulator for the federal government. “We took on a number of unconventional benefits last year and look forward to pushing the envelope further this year.”
Tim Murray, an experienced Medicare actuary and director at Wakely Consulting Group, agrees. “Adoption of the newly permissible benefits has so far been limited but has been growing exponentially each year since 2019. I look forward to working with Consortium participants as the industry advances from the experimentation phase to the efficacy measurement and optimization stage.”
The Consortium will be comprised of 30 provider-sponsored and regional health plans from the Alliance membership. It includes several of the highest quality plans in the MA program. Consortium activities kick off this month and will continue through the end of 2021.
