How Health Plans Can Engage the Unengaged and Unlock Member Lifetime Value: A Q&A with N1 Health’s Jacob Luria
By Josh Martin, Group Director, Healthcare Practice Lead
In today’s healthcare landscape, health plans face enormous financial and operational pressures — from shifting risk-adjustment policies to rising member churn. Yet one of the biggest opportunities for health plans often goes untapped: engaging the unengaged.
To explore this further, I sat down with Jacob Luria, President and Founder of N1 Health. N1 — along with Media Logic and Volute — is a founding partner in the Member Value Optimizer (MVO), a solution designed to help health plans activate hard-to-reach members and improve long-term performance. In our conversation, Jacob shared why engaging all members (not just the vocal few) is critical, what lessons health plans can learn from consumer brands, and how technology, data, and services must come together to make it work.
Josh Martin: Let’s start with the basics. What’s the core opportunity health plans are missing when it comes to engagement?
Jacob Luria: Most health plans focus their attention on already-engaged members — the ones calling, scheduling visits, or logging in. But the real opportunity is in the long tail of members who aren’t engaging. These individuals may never activate on their own, yet they still drive revenue and costs. If you can reach them, guide them to use personalized services, and build a durable relationship, you unlock meaningful financial value — from increased tenure to improved risk adjustment to better care navigation.
Josh Martin: You’ve talked about how health plans can take cues from consumer companies. What are some of those lessons?
Jacob Luria: Great consumer brands — think Spotify, Amazon — don’t just wait for users to show up. They engage proactively and personally. Spotify is a great example: their personalized communication strategy reduces avoidable churn by about 6% month over month. That’s huge. And it’s not because they’re using more emails — it’s because every message is relevant. Health plans can apply this same principle: the more specific and granular the communication, the more likely it drives action.
Josh Martin: What’s stopping health plans from operating that way?
Jacob Luria: First, they often don’t have the right tools. Traditional population health platforms were built for clinical risk or quality tracking — not for planning high-value communications or segmenting members for lifetime value. Second, even with data, most plans don’t have the internal infrastructure to act on it. And third, tech alone won’t solve it. You need a combination of technology, data, and service expertise — people who understand your benefits, your populations, and how to activate them.
Josh Martin: That’s where Member Value Optimizer comes in?
Jacob Luria: Exactly. MVO is a joint offering from N1, Media Logic, and Volute — a technology-enabled service that brings everything together: big data sets, predictive models, creative engagement strategies, and operational capacity. We start with a high-value use case, like increasing annual wellness visit completion, and prove the impact. Then we scale from there. We’re not asking plans to “boil the ocean” — we’re helping them win a single battle, then giving them the tools to win the war.
Josh Martin: Can you give a real-world example of how this works?
Jacob Luria: Sure — one of our clients, an ACA plan, had high churn and major risk adjustment payment liabilities. By identifying unengaged members likely to drive HCC risk, we launched personalized outreach using tailored incentives — things like Costco gift cards or Xbox Live memberships, pulled from their existing rewards catalog. The result? A 30% increase in annual wellness visit completion rates among unengaged members, and a $4.6 million reduction in risk adjustment liabilities. That’s money straight to the bottom line.
Josh Martin: You mentioned that technology alone isn’t enough. What’s the role of services in making MVO work?
Jacob Luria: Services are the glue. We’ve never met a plan that disagrees with the idea of more personalized engagement. The challenge is how to do it at scale. MVO includes a team that understands health plan operations — people who know what lifetime value looks like in a duals plan, or how to activate an ACA adult on a bronze plan. This isn’t just about sending messages — it’s about sequencing the right actions, managing the operational lift, and helping internal teams adopt a new way of working. Change management is part of the model.
Josh Martin: Final question. If you’re a health plan executive thinking about improving engagement, where should you start?
Jacob Luria: Start with one clear use case that delivers value quickly — like closing annual wellness visits. Don’t try to solve everything at once. Build your win, prove the financial impact — you should aim to see results in 3-6 months — and use that momentum to expand. And most importantly, don’t settle for blunt communication. Your members are individuals. Treat them that way — with specificity, relevance, and respect — and they’ll reward you with loyalty and better outcomes.
If you’re interested in learning how MVO can help your health plan engage the unengaged and drive meaningful business outcomes, contact me, jmartin@medialogic.com, to learn more.
N1 Health is an applied AI platform that helps healthcare organizations improve patient outcomes and financial performance by combining consumer data, predictive models, and cloud technology to enable precise, targeted interventions.
