News & Resources

WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES, March 11, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ — The SNP Alliance and the Center to Advance Consumer Partnership (CACP) are pleased to announce a partnership to elevate consumer voice in Special Needs Plan design and operations as well as to ensure lived experience is incorporated into plan strategic planning. The SNP Alliance and CACP will be working together on best practice and policy to advance consumer voice.

Melinda Karp, Executive Director of the Center to Advance Consumer Partnership (CACP), sat down with Modern Healthcare to discuss best practices for engaging consumers in the development of new programs, products, and services. Melinda also discussed the skills, leadership, investments, and commitment required for any organization to launch successful consumer-partnership initiatives.

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago highlighted CCA and the Center to Advance Consumer Partnership (CACP) in its Medicaid MCO Learning Hub “Spotlight Series.” Melinda Karp, senior vice president at CCA and executive director at CACP, shared how both organizations deploy a number of strategies, such as the Member Voices program and journey mapping, to understand members’ pain points and interactions that shape the consumer experience. Melinda also highlighted the importance of treating consumers as true partners and experts through shared decision‑making.

Journey mapping lays the foundation for an organizational culture that reinforces the power of consumers’ lived experience, creates a roadmap for change, and highlights opportunities to create responsive solutions that can help improve care and services. This info brief outlines CACP’s unique approach to journey mapping, which includes leveraging insights from consumers with significant needs to validate an organization’s journey map and prioritize improvement opportunities.

Embedding the consumer voice into an organization’s fabric and culture is not only the right thing to do but also an empathetic, forward-thinking business decision.  CACP Executive Director Melinda Karp discusses how “organizational empathy” supports the integration of consumer expertise into all aspects of strategy development and operations.

Health care has been slow to embrace empathy as a core business practice.  Recently, CACP Executive Director Melinda Karp participated in a Bright Spots in Healthcare Roundtable discussion about the imperative for organizations to empathize with their consumers—particularly those with complex health and social needs.

CACP has selected six Early Adopter organizations, Cardinal Innovations, Colorado Access, Community Health Plan of Washington, Health Care Access Maryland, Health Plan of San Mateo, and SCAN Health Plan to test CACP’s consumer partnership framework in their organizations, participate in collaborative community learning with CACP and one another; and engage with CACP’s external evaluation team to support a formative evaluation of CACP’s Consumer Partnership Model.

In late 2019, Commonwealth Care Alliance was awarded a $1.77M grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to support the work of its Center to Advance Consumer Partnership.  Over thirty months, CACP will move the complex care field forward through real world testing of its Consumer Partnership Model in six Early Adopter organizations, creation of a Learning Community, and development of an evidence base to support the consumer partnership value proposition.