Health Insurance Literacy – eXtention Ask an Expert

The nationwide Extension system responded to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by providing health insurance and healthcare education. The Health Insurance Literacy eXtension Community of Practice was created to inform consumers and respond to
Consumer inquiries

The Ask an Expert (AaE) feature of eXtension.org has allowed for years one-to-one expert answers from Extension/University faculty and volunteers from across the United States. The latest version of AaE expands that one-to-one relationship via the ability to make questions and answers publicly available, on an opt-in basis, searchable by the most popular search engines, and able to cultivate additional dialogue among the online community. This will skin and promote Ask an Expert as a premier resource for answering questions that lead people to become health insurance literate and to make smart choices for themselves and their families at this opportune moment of epic change in our American healthcare system.

We used data and outputs for Google Analytics to obtain data visitor behaviors (hits, returning visitors, electronic device used) and demographics (gender, age, geographical location) from June 2013 to January 2014.

Conclusion:

• Considering the professionals and efforts put into this project, we thought that the number of hits is very low. This is especially true when our eXtension publications are research-based and handled by unbiased university academicians.
• Google Analytics is a useful tool for evaluation and program improvements.

Recommendations:

• Investing in AdWords,
• Having online video publications,
• Improving SEO (search engine optimization) : tag website contents including images, blogging with rich contents, and
• Making mobile-friendly view publications.