Administration on Aging
Client
The U.S. Administration on Aging (AoA) has established Senior Medicare Patrol (SMP) projects that recruit senior volunteers and professionals to inform older Americans and other Medicare beneficiaries about detecting and reporting erroneous, fraudulent, or wasteful Medicare and Medicaid spending.
Challenge
Patients are the first line of defense against healthcare care waste, fraud, and abuse, but it can be difficult to educate seniors and even harder to mobilize them. AoA needed to both demonstrate for seniors the importance of stopping Medicare and Medicaid abuse and make it easy for them to report wasteful activity.
Enter Reingold
Reingold worked closely with AoA to craft simple messages that explain the high price all Americans pay for Medicare and Medicaid abuse and clearly illustrate the fundamental actions senior citizens should take in response to fraud: Protect, Detect, Report. Then we created a series of core materials for distribution nationwide, including a personal healthcare journal for tracking costs, an informational brochure, radio and video PSAs, and two videos—featuring actual SMP volunteers—to highlight common scams and demonstrate specific ways that seniors can stop fraudulent acts. Our core materials were translated into Simple Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish for Latin America, Korean, and Native American to help educate hard-to-reach populations.
Results
When AoA distributed our campaign materials nationwide, the Connecticut agency on aging was so impressed that it called on Reingold to create additional customized materials for the state's seniors.