5. Plan for Recruitment and Enrollment

Understand Recruitment and Enrollment

Effectively identifying employees who are both eligible and ready to enroll in the National DPP lifestyle change program will drive your success. Many factors will affect your efforts, including what eligibility criteria you choose, how you plan to identify eligible employees, and how the program will be administered and delivered. Regardless of which approach you choose, you will need to begin by raising awareness and end with a process that allows participants to enroll in the program easily. Here are two examples of how these factors may affect your strategy:
  • If you’re using the Prediabetes Risk Test to identify eligible participants, you’ll need to spend time raising awareness broadly among your entire employee population. If you’re using a retrospective review of claims data to identify eligible participants, you’ll be more likely to work with a third-party organization to conduct targeted outreach.
  • If you’re using an existing vendor, like a health plan provider or pharmacy benefits manager, to administer the program, you’ll probably use their practices and resources. But you should also be familiar with CDC’s recruitment and enrollment resources.

What Approaches Have Other Employers Used?

It can be helpful to hear about what other organizations have done. We’ve provided two employer stories to highlight how benefit administration and identification methods can shape recruitment and enrollment strategies for the National DPP lifestyle change program.

Latham and Watkins (Latham), a law firm in New York that contracted directly with a CDC-recognized organization, New York-Presbyterian to deliver the program. Latham worked collaboratively with New York-Presbyterian to build program awareness and increase enrollment. As part of its recruitment efforts, Latham proactively targeted the most at-risk personnel through various promotional materials. Immediately after screening events for prediabetes, Latham set up a private space with a nurse from New York-Presbyterian to provide suggestions or answer questions of interested employees. This provided an immediate resource to Latham’s employees, and the nurse had the ability to refer and enroll employees in real time to the National DPP lifestyle change program. (Source: here.)

The University of Michigan (U-M), a public research university, offered the National DPP lifestyle change program as a medical benefit to its employees. Blue Care Network (BCN), the vendor delivering the program at UM, implemented three enrollment strategies with different cohorts:

  1. Mailed Letter Outreach: BCN started with reviewing retrospective claims data and identifying those who had prediabetes, then mailed personalized letters to those employees.
  2. Direct Primary Care Provider Referral: The second strategy used data algorithms to identify employees that were at risk for developing type 2 diabetes. Those persons were encouraged to see their primary care providers (PCP) to get an A1C test. Then, if confirmed for having prediabetes, the employee received a direct referral from the employee’s PCP to the National DPP lifestyle change program.
  3. Broad Outreach: Health plan members were encouraged to take the Risk Test. If the members were identified as high-risk, they were directed to their PCP for follow-up, where the PCP could provide a referral to the National DPP lifestyle change program.

(Source: here.)