Checklists are the easiest and best method to ensure that you complete everything you need to do when enrolling in Medicare – and there is a lot to do. At Fortende Health, we are all Seniors – and understand how easy it is to feel overwhelmed with the amount of information and complexity associated with Medicare enrollments – either initial enrollments or annually thereafter.
Our backgrounds include a lot of work with lean and 6 Sigma quality systems in healthcare – and we have been dedicated to checklists as a go-to solution ever since Dr. Atul Gawande wrote his brilliant book, The Checklist Manifesto – How to Get Things Right in 2009. For Seniors, good medical care begins with the right Medicare coverage – and we want to make sure that you are in the plan that works best for you. Whether we sell it to you or not.
We have our own internal checklists that we complete for each customer enrollment – we find that it is the only way to ensure we consistently deliver the level of compliant service we expect to deliver for our clients.
We want our clients to have checklist guidelines to provide:
- Things to do and information to gather prior to starting
- Key understanding about how Medicare applies to me and what I want from Medicare, and
- What to expect from any interaction with an agent/broker of Medicare plans.
There are two checklists associated with this article, and you can find them below.
- The first is New to Medicare Checklist and is focused on the mechanical steps of getting enrolled, and some decision support for picking the right initial pathway and plan.
- The second is the Annual Medicare Renewal Checklist which focuses on historical utilization and costs, thoughts about future needs, and what to expect from a broker in 2023.
We invite you to use our Medicare checklists and let us know if you find them useful, and what we can do to make them better. We are all Medicare beneficiaries ourselves and want to try to simplify and reduce the anxiety surrounding Medicare. Please let us know if they help.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch!
– Garrison Keillor
