2009 MA and PDP Benefit Design Plans Are Due to CMS Soon. What's your strategy?

Dates for submitting 2009 MA and Part D plan designs are fast approaching. DSS Research offers a complete suite of product and benefit design services for health insurance carriers who offer senior products.

In the last 24 months, we’ve worked with countless health plan carriers to expand, redefine and strengthen their Medicare product portfolios. We’ve helped carriers who have been in the market expand on what they currently offer, as well as many new players who are just getting started.

Our research approach is straightforward, yet yields very sophisticated, valuable data. Data you can use to build a robust, successful MA program for 2009. Our research helps to better understand:

What products and benefits do consumers value/undervalue?
Through conjoint (trade-off) analysis, we are able to determine in a powerful and reliable way the value consumers place on different product features (also called utilities) such as brand, premium, co-pay, network, out-of network coverage, Rx, etc.

How to identify consumers most likely to buy your products and the best way to market to them?
Our research includes a market segmentation component, which helps carriers to better understand the different characteristics of segments within your market and uncover the best ways to target these consumers and what types of communication and messaging are appropriate for each of the segments. For instance, seminars and meetings may work better with some of your segments and targeted direct mail better with others.

How to price products and benefits and make a profit?
In addition, if you can provide us with a limited set of your organizations actuarial data, we can show you, using empirical data, how to balance the value that consumers place on different benefits and associated levels with what it cost you to deliver those benefits. Our research has consistently found that there are benefits that are over and undervalued by consumers relative to what their cost are.

How to realistically simulate market response to new product offerings from you and your competitors?
The real bang for the buck is with our powerful Dominator 2020^® market simulation tool that lets you predict the impact, overall and by market segment, of changes in product features, premium, competitive actions and other elements.

Dominator 2020^® is our web based tool that the uses the conjoint utilities to enable you and others in your organization to continuously apply our insights in realistic simulations to guide product decisions long after the study is complete.

This tool lets you see how products you are considering will perform:

• Against your current products and analyze cannibalization if you plan to add new products to your portfolio and retain the ones you already have.
• Against the competition in regard to what they have now or what you think they might have in the future.
• In different demographic groups of seniors – by age, by income, by any demographic characteristic in our extensive data battery.

Whatever your current Medicare offering, we can help you map a specific action plan. Give us a call at 1.800.989.5150 or email us for more information.

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