Zero Errata, Lower Costs, and a Smoother AEP: ATRIO Health Plans’ Transformation with Messagepoint

BACKGROUND: The Pressure of Annual CMS Updates for a Lean Team

ATRIO Health Plans is a Medicare Advantage Organization (MAO) serving members across Oregon. Like all MAOs, ATRIO must update its plans, along with corresponding plan communications and marketing materials, each year for the Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) to align with updated Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) requirements. The most complex materials are the regulated Annual Notice of Change (ANOC), Evidence of Coverage (EOC), and Summary of Benefits (SB) documents. As a lean organization requiring staff to wear multiple hats, ATRIO has very little margin for error when producing accurate, compliant materials for its 16 plans in time for CMS’s deadline.

In 2024, ATRIO faced serious challenges managing its AEP materials. Production bottlenecks compressed their timelines and forced staff to work late nights, ultimately resulting in multiple errata. These errors were costly to fix and damaged the organization’s confidence in their current communication management solution. “Clearly, what we were doing wasn’t working,” said Cristi Vredenburg, VP of Enrollment, Product & Marketing, “so we decided to explore other options and see what would work better for us.”

CHALLENGE: An Inefficient System Causes Costly Errors

The third-party solution ATRIO used to manage AEP materials preparation left the team without enough time to perform thorough QA, causing mistakes to slip into final materials. This prompted ATRIO to reassess its approach and identify the following areas where a new solution could better support accuracy and efficiency:

Inefficient, manual processes:

After staff turnover on the marketing and materials team, ATRIO was left with only one person capable of making changes, creating a bottleneck that greatly slowed progress. The solution required extensive training to operate, so it was difficult to get others on the team up to speed.

Costly and time-consuming translation and accessibility remediation:

Their current solution did not have the built-in capabilities for managing translation and producing 508C compliant PDFs, both of which must be done to meet CMS requirements. As a result, ATRIO had to outsource the production of these versions to costly third-party vendors, and the work could not begin until the English materials were finalized. This pushed these steps to the end of the process, further compressing an already tight project schedule.

Manual coordination and version control:

Without a tool to manage their workflows and track progress, the team was left coordinating internal teams and external vendors manually. As a result, assigning tasks, gathering approvals, and ensuring that everyone had the latest document versions was a constant challenge.

SOLUTION: Streamlining AEP Prep with the Messagepoint Healthcare Touchpoint Exchange

ATRIO went in search of a solution that would reduce manual effort and accelerate the process, so they could dedicate more time and resources to QA. The Messagepoint Healthcare Touchpoint Exchange (HTPE), a purpose-built SaaS solution designed to streamline the creation and annual updates of Medicare Advantage materials, quickly emerged as the only solution capable of delivering these outcomes.

Cristi felt that Messagepoint’s intuitive user interface, combined with integrated accessibility, translation, and QA capabilities directly addressed the usability and coordination challenges they faced using their prior solution. With AEP prep season fast approaching, ATRIO also valued the flexibility of Messagepoint’s operating model and chose to begin with the fully managed service, so that work could begin immediately while their team got comfortable with the platform.

Expert guidance through significant CMS changes

Leveraging Messagepoint via a managed service proved invaluable for AEP 2026 as CMS introduced its most extensive changes in years— requiring thousands of updates across all ANOCs and EOCs—releasing the updates weeks later than usual. Messagepoint’s Medicare specialists managed the complexity of incorporating the CMS changes, while the ATRIO team focused on reviewing materials and validating accuracy. Weekly check-ins, clear timelines, and proactive reminders from the Messagepoint team kept the project on schedule and ensured ATRIO’s team always understood what was needed and when.

A pre-built starting point

Messagepoint’s platform provides a pre-built starting point that incorporates the latest CMS models. This combined with the platform’s ability to seamlessly incorporate plan data directly from ATRIO’s Plan Benefit Package (PBP) file, enabled updated ANOCs, EOCs, and SBs for all plans to be generated within days of CMS releasing the new models. This accelerated process enabled their team to begin reviews far earlier than in previous years.

Consistency and efficiency through a single point of change

Messagepoint’s modular content management approach enabled common content—such as benefit descriptions and cost-share information— to be managed as reusable content elements governed from a single point of change. Instead of updating each document individually, Messagepoint’s team could apply an update once and have it flow automatically across all affected ANOCs, EOCs, and SBs. This enabled fast turnaround times for changes and improved consistency in ATRIO’s materials. As Olivia McCarthy, Manager of Product Development, said, “When I fixed an issue in one place, I knew it would be fixed across the board.”

Improved collaboration and control with integrated QA

Messagepoint’s QA Module streamlined ATRIO’s document review process while improving accuracy. The team could assign tasks and balance workloads across reviewers, and multiple stakeholders work in parallel without the version control issues that previously slowed their process. The platform’s dashboards provided clear visibility into project status—what required review, by whom, and by when—helping the team stay aligned and on schedule. Side-by-side change comparisons made it easy to verify that updates had been applied correctly, reducing the risk of errors in the final versions.

“It really helped having everything in one place with Messagepoint, reviewing it in the platform that I was familiar and comfortable with.”

Olivia McCarthy, Manager of Product Development, ATRIO Health Plans
Streamlined Translation and 508C Compliance

ATRIO also saw significant benefit from Messagepoint’s integrated translation and accessibility capabilities. Because the platform enables individual sections of documents to be translated as they are finalized—rather than requiring the entire document to be complete—Spanish translation work could begin weeks earlier than in previous years. In addition, Messagepoint automatically generates 508-compliant and large-print PDFs, eliminating the need to outsource accessibility remediation.

“In previous years, we had to wait almost four weeks for our materials to be made 508 compliant. This year, we were able to post accessible versions on our website on October 1. That’s not something we’ve ever been able to do.”

Olivia McCarthy, Manager of Product Development, ATRIO Health Plans

IMPACT: ATRIO’s Smoothest AEP Prep Season Yet

ATRIO’s first year with Messagepoint was overwhelmingly successful. Despite the extensive model changes CMS introduced, ATRIO submitted the ANOCs, EOCs, and SBs for all plans on time and the team felt they were always ahead of schedule throughout the process.

Because updates were turned around far faster than in previous years, the team finally had the runway to conduct a thorough QA review of their materials. This additional time, combined with expert guidance from Messagepoint’s Medicare team, directly contributed to ATRIO achieving their primary goal: zero errata across all materials.

ATRIO also realized cost savings. ATRIO’s analysis showed that Messagepoint’s fully managed service—including translation and 508C compliance—was less expensive than their previous process once all costs were factored in, while also reducing the time and effort required from ATRIO’s team.

The positive contrast with prior years was immediately clear to ATRIO’s leadership. As Cristi shared, their CEO remarked that “we have never had such a clean, efficient materials process.” The results were compelling enough that ATRIO chose to continue with the fully managed service. Being able to offload much of their AEP prep work to a reliable partner like Messagepoint was well worth the investment.

“Messagepoint greatly increased our efficiency. We had our materials translated and available much earlier than the year before.”

Cristi Vredenburg, VP of Enrollment, Product & Marketing, ATRIO Health Plans

BENEFITS

• Zero errata across all ANOCs, EOCs, and SBs for 16 plans
• English, Spanish and 508 compliant materials submitted on time, weeks earlier than prior years
• Reduced costs compared to their previous vendor
• Significantly more time for QA and reduced coordination effort across teams
• Less workload and stress for ATRIO’s team