FROM WHITEBOARDS TO WINS: How A PACE Provider Leveraged Navigator to Increase Enrollments by 19%

Client Overview

Part of One Senior Care, a leading PACE provider in rural Appalachia, LIFE NWPA serves a 12 county area in and around Erie, Pennsylvania.

The Challenge

Like many PACE programs, LIFE-NWPA was managing participant enrollment through manual tools, such as spreadsheets, shared drives, and white boards.

Leads were difficult to track, communication with referral sources was ad hoc, and leadership lacked visibility into which prospective participants were moving forward and which were stalling out. Forecasting future enrollments was educated guesswork.

“We knew we were missing opportunities to enroll more seniors, but couldn’t pinpoint exactly where or why,” explained Marcie Campbell, VP of Marketing for LIFE-NWPA’s parent company, One Senior Care.

With no solid data foundation, decisions on staffing, marketing budgets, and outreach strategies were happening without data-driven certainty. The organization knew that to grow sustainably, it needed to gain control over its pipeline, and not just more leads.

The Traktion Approach — The Navigator Framework

Traktion created its Navigator process, a seven-stage framework that combines process design, technology, and analytics, to help specialty healthcare organizations solve one of their greatest common challenges - driving predictable growth.

For this PACE organization, Navigator provided the roadmap to provide streamlined, measurable enrollment operation.

Stage 1 – Needs Assessment & Goal Alignment

Cross-functional workshops aligned enrollment, marketing, and operations teams around common goals. Key performance indicators were defined, including lead-to-enrollment conversion rate, average cycle time, and lead source ROI, all aimed at establishing a data-driven baseline for success.

Stage 2 – Intake Process Design

Traktion worked with LIFE-NWPA to map the full participant journey from Lead → Intake Visit → Active Pipeline → Enrollment, as well as all of the nuanced stages in-between including the complex Medicaid eligibility process. This revealed delays at critical handoff points and led to standardized workflows and escalation protocols for stalled leads.

Stage 3 – Journey Mapping

Communication workflows were developed to ensure consistent follow-up with caregivers and prospects, specifically around targeted outbound calling campaigns, each coordinated to reduce friction and lost opportunities.

Stage 4 & 5 – CRM Selection & Implementation

Multiple CRM solutions were evaluated. The focus wasn’t on forcing a single platform, but rather ensuring that whichever system was in place could support the organization’s data visibility and process needs. Upon selection, Traktion led implementation, training, and a soft launch that allowed the team to gain confidence quickly.

Stage 6 – KPI Dashboard Architecture

Leadership gained real-time visibility into enrollment funnel performance, from lead-to-enrollment cycle time, to lead source effectiveness through intuitive dashboards built directly into their CRM. Gone were the days of spreadsheets and manual capturing of data. Confidence was instilled in the decision-making process.

Stage 7 – Post-Launch Optimization

Traktion established a rhythm of weekly progress reviews and quarterly audits, embedding data-driven decision making into ongoing operations, transforming how LIFE-NWPA could run the day-to-day business.

Key Results

• 19% increase in new enrollments
  Clear visibility into the funnel and consistent follow-up processes directly improved conversion rates.

• Re-engagement with previously unqualified seniors
  A structured process for re-evaluating and nurturing unqualified leads expanded the potential participant pool.

• Improved intake velocity
  Optimized the speed at which leads progressed through the funnel, reducing friction for seniors and improving staff efficiency.

• Predictable growth modeling
  For the first time, leadership could forecast enrollments based on lead volume, helping plan outreach and staffing with confidence.

• Lead source optimization
  Specific insights into which referral and marketing channels delivered the highest-quality enrollments allowed for smarter allocation of marketing resources.

“Traktion has played an important role in our growth, providing process and technology that has scaled as we’ve doubled our number of centers. Traktion’s Navigator gave us the roadmap. The technology followed, but creating a data-driven process is what changed everything,” said Campbell.

Conclusion

In an industry focused on helping seniors age gracefully and on their terms, most PACE organizations don’t suffer from a lack of effort, but from a lack of visibility. Navigator changes that by giving teams the structure and insights to grow confidently and sustainably.

Whether a CRM is currently in place or not, Traktion’s Navigator framework can layer on a better process for delivering results, including:

• Full visibility into the enrollment pipeline.

• Predictable models for hitting enrollment targets.

• A better participant experience through faster, clearer communication.

By focusing on process before platform, then laying in the right technology, this PACE organization found clarity, and achieved measurable, lasting growth.