CMS May Hire Medicare Advantage Mystery Shoppers

CMS says marketplace and surveillance activities

could include:

• Secret shopping of public marketing events.
• Targeted observations of public marketing events as directed by the CMS Surveillance team.
• Ad Hoc activities to possibly include:
• • Review of third party marketing sites.
  • Year-round monitoring of agent marketing practices to dual eligible beneficiaries.
  • Monitoring of [prescription drug plan] marketing tactics.
  • Data analysis and reporting.
• Review of newspapers and other paper and electronic communications to identify unreported marketing events.
• Monitoring of organizations that non-renew or reduce the service area of their [Medicare Advantage] or [prescription drug plan] contracts.
• Review of social networking sites.
• Assessment of [Medicare Advantage] and [prescription drug plan] practices as they impact vulnerable populations, including, but not limited to individuals who are non-English speaking, or physically and/or mentally challenged, or low/limited income or low education.

Contractor staffers may have to attend scheduled or unscheduled marketing events, complete a public marketing and sales events secret shopping script and scoring tool, and review print and social media for noncompliance with CMS guidelines, officials say.

CMS wants contractors with staffers that have experience with non-English speaking populations, including consumers who speak Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Armenian.