Medicare beneficiaries and their families sometimes encounter challenges while receiving health care services. A patient may receive an incorrect dosage of a prescription, the wrong treatment for their condition, or be discharged too soon from a health care facility.

As one of the two Beneficiary and Family Centered Care-Quality Improvement Organizations serving Medicare beneficiaries throughout the United States, Livanta helps people with Medicare exercise their right to high-quality health care. Livanta’s Immediate Advocacy service is a free, informal and voluntary process to quickly resolve patient complaints. Whatever the challenge may be, Livanta works to address concerns and innovate ways patients can find and access assistance.

Since the original launch of the app in 2015, Livanta has researched user interaction with the tool and implemented improvements which simplify access to resources at the time and place patients need them most.

To facilitate Immediate Advocacy employing current technologies, Livanta created the LivantaCares Medicare Helpline app, which is designed to improve information and resource access for patients who increasingly are using mobile devices in their daily activities. Since the original launch of the app in 2015, Livanta has researched user interaction with the tool and implemented improvements which simplify access to resources at the time and place patients need them most.

For the latest release of the app, Livanta added GPS location services and push notifications to alert users when they are at or near an acute care hospital. With the permission of the user, this service allows patients and families to review their rights under Medicare law. Livanta has further enhanced its commitment to patient advocacy by adding real-time case tracking into the app. Patients and families can now track the status of appeals and complaints directly from the LivantaCares Medicare Helpline App.

At Livanta’s request, the Beneficiary and Family Centered Care National Coordinating Center’s (BFCC-NCC) Beneficiary and Family Advisory Council (BFAC) provided feedback from the app’s current users. Based on user responses, Livanta made improvements to the language in the app, as well as visual improvements to make screens easier to read. In the weeks after the release of the updated app, Livanta tracked a 100 percent growth in downloads from the same period last year.

Livanta also saw offline success between August 2017 and July 2018, answering 198,540 calls to their helpline and assisting 89,069 beneficiaries with advocacy requests.