How to Prep Your DPC for Jan 1: Medicare & Medicare Advantage

A done-for-you open enrollment packet from My DPC Story

Every fall, your Medicare patients get a confusing letter in the mail and bring their questions straight to you. This packet hands you the whole system to handle it, the talk tracks, the copy-paste emails and texts, the patient handout, the tracker, and the social posts, all timed to the open enrollment calendar. You do not need to be a Medicare expert or an insurance agent. You need to know which patients to flag, what to say in two minutes, and where to hand them off. That is exactly what is inside.

Here is the thing about open enrollment. You did not go into medicine to memorize ANOC letters, Part D tiers, and MA do-over windows. But your Medicare patients do not know who else to ask. So every September the letters land, and every October the questions start, and if you do not have a system, it eats your front desk and your visits alive.

This packet is the system. It works whether you are brand new to Medicare and quietly nervous about saying the wrong thing, or you have done this for years and you are just tired of rebuilding the same scripts and reminders from scratch every fall.

If open enrollment still feels like a foreign language to you, start here. The whole thing is written in plain English. You will learn the three windows that actually matter, the handful of patients to prioritize, and what to say so you sound clear and confident without pretending to be an insurance agent. The hard-off paths show you exactly when and how to point patients to SHIP, the Medicare Plan Finder, or a trusted broker, so you stay in your lane and out of trouble. You come out of it understanding open enrollment well enough to guide any patient through it.

If you already know Medicare cold, this saves you the part you hate. No writing the ANOC reminder email from scratch. No wording the last-chance text. No building the tracker spreadsheet again. No staring at a blank social post in October. It is all here, timed and ready, so your team runs the season instead of scrambling through it.

Here is everything inside.

Section 1 is the Open Enrollment Talk Track. The key dates, a quick triage list of who to flag first, fast scripts for the phone and front desk, a two-minute in-visit talk track, lightning answers to the questions patients actually ask, the documentation tags that make January easy, the hand-off paths so you never play insurance agent, and a five-minute micro-training to get your whole team on the same page.

Section 2 is the Messaging Kit. Four plug-and-play templates, each with an email plus short and ultra-short text versions: the ANOC heads-up, open enrollment is starting, the Dec 7 last-chance reminder, and the January pharmacy check. Copy, paste, drop in your portal link, send. Light personalization instructions included.

Section 3 is the Patient Handout. A clean, one-page explainer your patients can keep that answers the question every Medicare patient asks: how does my DPC membership work alongside Medicare or Medicare Advantage? It lays out what your membership covers, what Medicare covers, what is new with prescriptions and vaccines, how to pay for DPC on Medicare, and what to do every fall.

Section 4 is the Open Enrollment Tracker. A plug-and-play spreadsheet with dropdowns so you can see at a glance who has uploaded their ANOC, whose meds are current, who needs a coverage check, and who needs a January pharmacy follow-up or MA do-over outreach. No building it from scratch.

Section 5 is the Social Media Kit. Five friendly, copy-paste captions for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, timed to the season, with a Canva link to matching graphics. Paste, tweak to your voice, add your links, post.

Used together, this turns the messiest stretch of your year into a calm, repeatable rhythm. Your team knows who to flag, what to say, what to send, and when to send it. Your patients walk into January without pharmacy surprises. And you never have to become the insurance expert, because the whole point is offering clarity and clean hand-offs, not promising coverage.

Anyone who takes care of patients who have Medicare needs this, IMO. You do not have to understand every corner of Medicare to use it well. You just have to know where to start, and now you do!

~Maryal