How Should Your Practice Handle Medicare Open Enrollment?

Medicare open enrollment, the season officially called the Annual Enrollment Period, runs from October 15 to December 7 every year, and 2026 is no different. For about eight weeks, more than 67 million people on Medicare are told, over and over, to think about their healthcare for the coming year. Anything they change takes effect January 1.

Here is the mistake a lot of practice owners make. They see the plan commercials, decide the whole thing is a broker circus that has nothing to do with a doctor's office, and tune it out. Then they wonder why January feels chaotic, why a handful of long time patients suddenly show up out of network, and why the fourth quarter schedule had more gaps than it should have. The season was talking to your patients the whole time. You just were not in the conversation.

First, the part that trips everyone up

There is a real and important line here, so let us draw it clearly. Marketing a Medicare Advantage or Part D plan is heavily regulated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Those rules exist for a reason, and they are the job of insurance plans and licensed agents, not you.

Marketing your practice is a completely different thing. A doctor's office saying it accepts Medicare, reminding patients about a covered wellness visit, and inviting new patients to book is ordinary healthcare marketing. It is not bound by the plan advertising rules, because you are not selling a plan. You are offering care. Keep those two ideas separate and the whole season opens up, because you are free to promote your practice while the plans fight over the airwaves.

Most seniors do not switch plans. They rethink their care.

The surprising truth about open enrollment is how little actually changes for most people. A KFF analysis found that nearly 7 in 10 Medicare beneficiaries did not compare their coverage against other options during a recent enrollment period, and the vast majority did not switch plans at all. The same research found 44 percent of Medicare Advantage enrollees never even reviewed their own plan for changes to the drugs and services it covers.

So if hardly anyone shops, why does the season matter to you? Because the noise still does its job. For eight weeks, healthcare is top of mind for every senior in your town. They open the mail, they field the calls, they talk to their adult kids over the holidays about whether their doctor is still a good fit. In that window a few things happen that land right on your doorstep. Someone realizes their plan changed and their longtime doctor is now out of network. Someone new to town or newly on Medicare goes looking for a practice. And a lot of people finally book the visit they have been avoiding all year because the calendar is about to reset.

That is the opportunity. Not the plan switching, which you cannot control anyway. The attention. The people who serve seniors, primary care, cardiology, audiology, podiatry, ophthalmology, know that the fourth quarter is when a Medicare patient decides who they are going to trust with next year. If your practice is invisible or looks neglected when they check, you lose that decision before you ever meet them.

The free benefit almost half your patients skip

If you want one concrete, honest thing to build the season around, make it the Annual Wellness Visit. It is a yearly preventive visit that Medicare Part B covers at no cost to the patient, and it is one of the most underused benefits in the whole program. Research on how often people actually use it found that fewer than half of eligible beneficiaries get one in a given year.

Sit with that. Half of the patients who are entitled to a free, covered visit are leaving it on the table, usually because nobody told them it exists or reminded them the year is ending. That is not a marketing gimmick. It is genuinely good for the patient, it is good preventive care, and it happens to fill your slowest weeks. A plain text or email in November that says you have a wellness visit available this year at no cost to you, want us to book it before the calendar resets does real work. People book it. They feel looked after. And you turn a quiet December into a full one.

This is the same instinct behind reminding patients who have already hit their deductible that now is the cheapest time to handle a procedure. We wrote about that separately in how to market to patients who met their deductible, and the two ideas pair perfectly for a fourth quarter push.

Where seniors actually check before they choose you

There is a stubborn myth that older patients are not online, so digital marketing does not reach them. It is wrong, and it gets more wrong every year. Seniors and, just as important, the adult children who help them choose a doctor are searching, reading reviews, and increasingly asking AI assistants for options. We dug into that shift in whether older patients are using AI to find doctors, and the short answer is more of them every month.

So when the season puts your practice in the running, here is what decides it.

Your Google Business Profile. This is the first thing anyone sees. It needs to say clearly that you accept Medicare, list your real hours, and carry a steady stream of recent reviews. A senior comparing two cardiologists is going to pick the one with forty recent reviews and a complete profile over the one with six reviews from three years ago. It is free to fix and it is where the decision quietly happens.

A website that works on a phone. Adult kids research on their phones, at night, often on behalf of a parent. If your site is slow, buries what you treat, or forces a phone call to book, they bounce to the next name. A fast, calm, mobile first site that lets someone request or book a visit in a few taps is the difference between a lead and a lost one. It is exactly why we build websites for primary care and family medicine practices around one job: turn a search into a booked visit.

Local search. When someone types cardiologist near me that accepts Medicare or a family doctor taking new patients plus your town, you want to be there. That is local SEO for a family medicine practice, and it is slower to build than an ad but it compounds and keeps working long after any seasonal budget runs dry. The practices that rank in October are the ones with a full schedule in January.

Answer the phone. Seriously.

One more thing, and it is the one practices ignore most. Seniors call. They are the most likely group to pick up the phone instead of filling out a form, and during open enrollment the phones ring more, with more questions about coverage and scheduling. If your front desk is already on another call, or it is after hours, or it is a busy Monday and nobody picks up, that patient hangs up and dials the practice down the street.

We have watched practices spend real money getting found, then drop the patient at the finish line because a phone rang out. If your team cannot catch every call during the busy season, that is exactly the gap our AI receptionist was built to close: it answers instantly, any hour, books the appointment, and hands off the ones that need a human. A missed call in December is a patient who found you, wanted you, and got away.

Do not confuse this with plan season noise

To be clear about what we are and are not saying: do not try to compete with the plan commercials, do not offer to help people pick a Medicare plan, and do not wade into anything that looks like plan marketing. That is not your lane and the rules around it are strict. Your lane is your care. Remind people you accept Medicare, promote the wellness visit, make yourself easy to find and easy to book, and answer the phone. That is more than enough to make the season work for you.

And the momentum does not stop on December 7. The new year rolls straight into the busiest stretch most practices see, when fresh deductibles, new coverage, and resolution energy send people looking for care. We broke that down in why January is the busiest month for medical practices. Open enrollment is the setup. January is the payoff. The practices that get found in the fall are the ones that cash it in.

Our honest take

Most practices treat Medicare open enrollment as background noise, something happening to insurance companies in a world they are not part of. That is the miss. You cannot and should not play in the plan game, but the season hands you something better: eight weeks where every senior in your area is actively thinking about their health and their doctor. You do not need a clever campaign. You need to be visible, credible, and reachable at the exact moment they look.

Fix the Google profile, get the site loading and booking, send the wellness visit reminders, and make sure a human or a smart assistant answers every call. Do that and you will feel the difference in a fuller fourth quarter and a stronger January, without ever touching the part of Medicare that is not yours to touch.

How EtherealMinds helps

We work only with healthcare practices in the United States, and the ones that serve Medicare patients have a real seasonal edge if they use it. We build the whole thing as one connected patient acquisition system: a Google Business Profile that ranks and collects reviews the right way, local SEO so you show up for the searches seniors and their families actually type, a fast website that books a nervous first time patient without a phone call, and an AI receptionist that catches the calls your front desk cannot during the busy weeks.

The goal is simple. When your town's seniors spend the fall deciding who to trust with next year, your practice is the one they find first, the one that looks solid, and the one that picks up. If you want a hand getting ready before October 15, we should talk.