What Functions on the Medicare Plan Finder Do Older Medicare Beneficiaries Use

The Medicare Plan Finder (MPF), a decision support tool on Medicare.gov, provides functions to help older users simplify their plan selection, but many users may be unaware of MPF functions, cannot locate them, or do not have desire to use them voluntarily. Existing literature offers little knowledge on older adults’ utilization of MPF functionality and human-computer interaction on MPF. Therefore, this study seeks to find 1) the relative usage of each MPF function toward plan decision and 2) assistance needed to improve MPF function usage. An observational study of 29 participants aged 65+ years was conducted during the Medicare open enrollment period of 2019. Each participant was paired with a counselor in a plan selection task using MPF, where they initially navigated MPF by themselves (i.e., self-moment) and then were allowed to ask their counselor for assistance. Data were collected through participants’ task screen videos and participant-counselor speech audios. Five MPF functional themes, plan details, sort plans, filter plans, compare plans, and star ratings, were identified as key functions impacting Medicare plan decision-making processes. Participants’ voluntary use of MPF functions was very rare, if any, during the self-moment. However, with the counselor guidance, the use of the key five functions became noticeably increased. These findings indicate meaningful contributions of the intervention of counselors (i.e., human agents) towards older users’ MPF function usage and suggest a need for an intelligent agent system that can supplement human agents through real-time, on-screen, conversation-based assistance for older users.