A group of students in the George Mason University Honors College won the Alumni Choice Award on December 5th for their work with insurance provider Anthem BlueCross BlueShield on improving user engagement with their app.
Caroline Castagna, Mohit Darla, Mikaela Lameles, Shannon Maldonado, and Kensy Velasquez worked on this project through Honors College Consults, a signature course developed to bring together multidisciplinary interests to create solutions for corporate and nonprofit partners.
The Anthem group focused on improving user knowledge of benefits and preventative care. Through their analysis, the group realized that the app had a lot of downloads, but was not at the retention and usage rate the client would prefer.
They proposed many in-app features and created a pilot AI model that could improve user engagement. “Community feature where Anthem could post articles and videos, and users could post comments or questions,” said group member Caroline Castagna. "It would all be organized based on health topics, like pregnancy, weight loss, healthy eating, et cetera.”
By creating these features, the group hoped to improve both the user experience and overall health literacy for Anthem clients. University Scholar Shannon Maldonado said, “We saw that there is a lack of health literacy... we saw that personalization [of the app] is a big thing, as well as simplicity for their health benefits.”