Medicare Annual Wellness Visits (AWVs) are one of the most effective ways to improve preventive care, identify health risks early, and strengthen patient relationships. This leads to improvements in care gaps and quality scores.

Yet despite being covered at no cost for eligible Medicare beneficiaries, Annual Wellness Visit completion rates remain surprisingly low across the country.

Here's why so many patients miss their Medicare Annual Wellness Visit—and how healthcare organizations can improve AWV completion with more effective patient outreach.

Why Annual Wellness Visit Completion Rates Remain Low

Despite the benefits, many eligible patients never complete their Annual Wellness Visit.

Multi-year analyses published in Springer's Journal of General Internal Medicine and by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) highlight that AWV completion numbers sit well below half of the eligible population before specialized administrative quality improvements are put into place.

Individual healthcare organizations often experience even lower rates. At Mayo Clinic's Rochester internal medicine practice, researchers found that only 1.7% of eligible patients received an Annual Wellness Visit before implementing workflow improvements.

Low Annual Wellness Visit completion isn’t caused by a single issue. Instead, organizations faced multiple operational challenges, including:

• Difficulty identifying patients eligible for a Medicare Annual Wellness Visit

• No standardized Annual Wellness Visit workflow

• Limited patient communication and outreach

• Confusion about Medicare eligibility and covered services

• Provider uncertainty around documentation and billing

• Staffing shortages that limited patient outreach

These findings highlight a common challenge: improving AWV completion requires improving the entire patient engagement process.

Why Patients Miss Their Medicare Annual Wellness Visit

Many patients want preventive care but encounter barriers long before they reach the clinic.

According to Aflac's 2025 Wellness Matters Survey:

• 94% of Americans report facing barriers to recommended screenings.

• Nine out of ten have postponed a checkup or preventive screening that could detect serious health issues early.

The biggest obstacles often have nothing to do with healthcare itself. Nearly half of respondents cited logistical challenges such as:

• Transportation

• Difficulty taking time off work

• Caregiving responsibilities

• Scheduling challenges

These social and operational barriers directly affect Annual Wellness Visit completion and demonstrate why traditional reminder calls alone are often insufficient.

Why Annual Wellness Visits Matter for Quality Performance

Although the Medicare Annual Wellness Visit is not a HEDIS measure, it serves as one of the most valuable opportunities to close multiple care gaps during a single appointment.

During an Annual Wellness Visit, providers often complete or initiate:

• Preventive screenings

• Vaccinations

• Medication reviews

• Chronic disease management

• Depression screening

• Fall risk assessments

• Advance care planning

Rather than conducting separate outreach campaigns for every quality measure, healthcare organizations can use the Annual Wellness Visit as a central workflow for preventive care. This is an essential step in closing care gaps.

Improving Annual Wellness Visit completion often leads to higher preventive care utilization, stronger patient engagement, and better quality performance across multiple measures.

Best Practices for Annual Wellness Visit Outreach

Successful Annual Wellness Visit outreach goes beyond sending reminder letters.

Healthcare organizations that consistently improve AWV completion typically focus on reducing barriers throughout the patient journey.

Effective Annual Wellness Visit outreach includes:

• Automatically identifying patients eligible for an Annual Wellness Visit

• Delivering personalized reminders through text, voice, email, and other preferred communication channels

• Communicating in each patient's preferred language

• Following up with patients who do not respond

• Helping patients overcome transportation and other social barriers

• Making appointment scheduling simple and convenient

• Measuring outreach performance to continuously improve engagement

The more personalized and accessible the outreach experience, the more likely patients are to complete their Medicare Annual Wellness Visit.

How Blooming Health Helps Improve AWV Completion

Blooming Health helps healthcare organizations improve Annual Wellness Visit completion through AI-powered patient engagement and automated workflows.

Using personalized care journeys, healthcare organizations can automatically identify eligible patients, launch multilingual Annual Wellness Visit outreach campaigns, and engage patients through voice, text, and email without increasing staff workload.

Blooming Health also helps organizations identify and address social barriers that often prevent patients from completing preventive care, including transportation, food insecurity, and other non-medical needs.

By combining automated outreach with personalized engagement, healthcare organizations can improve AWV completion while creating more opportunities to close care gaps and improve quality performance.

Healthcare organizations that invest in personalized Annual Wellness Visit outreach can improve patient engagement, increase AWV completion, and create meaningful downstream improvements in quality performance.

Ready to improve Annual Wellness Visit completion? Speak with our team to learn how Blooming Health helps healthcare organizations automate Annual Wellness Visit outreach, engage more Medicare patients, and connect more people to preventive care.