[August 19, 2008]

Medicare Web site just doesn't click with users, study finds

(South Florida Sun-Sentinel (KRT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. _ A new University of Miami study confirms what seniors already know: Shopping for Medicare prescription drug coverage on the Medicare Web site can be confusing, even for techno-aware consumers.

Three-fourths of adults with modest computer skills could not navigate Medicare's Web site well enough to find the best drug plan, and 84 percent could not figure out how to sign up for home health service, according to the study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

"There are some problems ... some design features with the site that make it difficult for people to use, and they can't get the maximum value out of it," said Sara Czaja, co-director of the university medical school's Center on Aging, who led the study. "Some of them just gave up trying."

While only a fraction of seniors use computers, experts call the medicare.gov Web site the most powerful and best way to compare the multitude of Medicare drug plans.

Czaja said the study is the first to test how easy it is to use the site's "Drug Plan Finder," which lets users compare drug plans in their home area based on monthly premiums, co-payments, deductibles, covered drugs and other factors.

Researchers recruited 112 people over age 50 from Broward and Miami-Dade counties, and after brief training on the Web site, asked them to find the most advantageous drug plan or health service. Czaja's team later checked how they did by viewing logs of their computer activity.

The participants often were stymied by the site, she said. Some could not digest dense and technical language. Some could not find where to click to move to the next step. Some did not scroll enough to find key facts needed to make decisions. Some gave up the hunt before clicking through 10 or more pages needed to reach the results.

Medicare spokesman Jeff Nelligan defended the Web site, saying it gets more than 1 million hits a day, has been tested in focus groups since before it was introduced in 2005 and has been improved each year.

"We've worked hard to organize and format our quality 'compare' tools ... in a consumer-friendly manner by conducting both qualitative and quantitative research of the Web site tools with multiple audiences," Nelligan wrote in an e-mail.

"More research is probably needed to assess the usability of the site, and should be performed by people who have a basic understanding of the size and complexity of the program," he said.

Nelligan said adult children who know computers often use the Web site to help parents choose drug plans.

But Czaja said even younger adults in the over-50 test group were thwarted by the site's problems. The average person in the study was 63, had 14 years of school and had better-than-basic computer knowledge.

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