Are you prepared for annual enrollment? Here are six key steps to help your organization ensure all members’ language access needs are covered.

In every annual enrollment period, health plans need to ensure they meet compliance standards, tight deadlines, and budgetary requirements. 

This year, with updates to Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act emphasizing language access and equity and the 2024 Medicare Advantage final rulings focusing on strengthening translation and accessible format requirements, health plans must deliver an exceptional, inclusive member experience. Providing comprehensive language services and culturally relevant communications is key to engaging diverse members during this crucial enrollment period.  

Staying Ahead of the Curve 

As your plan prepares for a successful Annual Enrollment Period this year, it’s essential to stay ahead of the curve by optimizing your language services to meet the growing demands of an increasingly diverse member population.  

The following tactics will help you optimize your language access services for increased enrollment, better retention and improved member engagement: 

1.  Evaluate and improve the current experience. To know where you need to expand language services or adapt communication, you must look beyond the current experience against member needs or preferences.  Understanding where there are gaps or opportunities throughout the experiences can help you create an efficient and effective plan that improves outcomes.  Our comprehensive language access acceleration roadmap can help guide you in identifying these opportunities and implementing meaningful solutions.
   
   
2. Accelerate timelines while mitigating risks. Ensuring regulatory compliance while meeting tight deadlines requires a workflow tailored to the unique challenges of standardized documents like EOCs and ANOCs. Our team combines advanced automation with expert human quality review steps to streamline the process. This approach not only reduces manual effort and associated costs, but it also enhances accuracy, allowing you to confidently and efficiently meet deadlines. 
   
   
3. Send us your draft documents now and we can get started on translations right away. We know CMS may take some time to approve your drafts, but there is no need to lose weeks or even months with translations. As long as the changes are minor when you get final approval from the regulatory bodies, we can quickly update the translated versions and format them for you. 
   
   
4. Incorporate accessibility, alternate formats and 508 compliance into your process early. Doing so will not only ensure all communications are fully accessible, but it will also enhance efficiency by optimizing resources and timelines with your language services and/or accessibility providers. By addressing these requirements early, you can streamline the workflow, reduce the risk of costly rework, and ensure that your content meets all necessary compliance standards from the start. Learn more on how we help plans ensure accessibility through alternate formats.
   
   
5. Capitalize on your language assets. To truly maximize efficiencies, it's not just about having glossaries, style guides, and Translation Memory (TM)—it's about fully leveraging them to their highest potential. By partnering with an LSP that continuously evaluates, monitors, and fine-tunes your language assets, you can ensure your language investments are optimized for maximum impact. Over time, you’ll experience compounding improvements in turnaround times, cost savings, and consistency, ultimately enhancing the quality and efficiency of your language processes.  
   
   
6. Plan for increased call volume this year. Language access isn’t only about printed documents. Last-minute changes to the prices your members pay for coverage will likely generate increased call volume. Now is a good time to audit your over-the-phone interpreting solution to make sure you can quickly scale up and down as needed.  

How ULG Can Support You  

Our healthcare team will work with you every step of the way to plan for enrollment and compliance success. By collaborating early, we’ll determine how to best manage the versioning of your documents, accessibility requirements, leverage translation assets, scale for interpretation and more.  

Our easy-to-use online translation services through OctaveTMS  allows you to track the progress of your project at any point in time. In addition, our best-in-class interpretation platform is designed to scale for upcoming CMS test calls starting in February.  

Ready to get started? Contact us today!