Health Plan Providers Must Lower Language Barriers Among Subscribers

Year after year, the immigrant population of the United States increases, and as the country’s non-English speaking population increases, the differences in language are becoming a great barrier among health plan members and health care providers.

The 2013 Census Bureau’s data stated that one in every five residents in the country does not speak English at home. The number was up by 2.2 million from 2010, reaching a record high of 61.8 million in 2013. The largest increases were from speakers of Arabic, Chinese and Spanish.

This has become a dilemma among health plan sellers and health care providers. It has become quite a big problem as membership of non-English speakers increases. Health analytics have revealed that the language barriers are affecting membership loyalty as well as in providing care. Here are some of the reasons:

– There is a 70 percent probability for holders of Medicare Advantage Special Needs Plans who are non-English speakers to disenroll from the plan.

– There is a 10 percent probability for non-Spanish and non-English members who belong to the lower income bracket to defer having preventive screenings on a regular basis.

What is needed is a population health management program that is proactive to easily identify high-risk members. There should be a plan to pinpoint the ethnic, demographic, socioeconomic and other barriers that could be affecting adverse outcomes. After the identification, the health plans must do everything possible to reach out to these members in their own language.

Attempts to build a providers’ network and loyalty to a health plan are subverted by language barriers. Often the members would rather visit providers out of the health plan network because they are more comfortable receiving care from nurses and doctors who speak their language.

The idea of identifying health plan members who are non-English speakers is for the purpose of finding physicians within the network who also speak the language members speak, to satisfy them and preventing their defection.

A case in point is Healthfirst, a not-for-profit plan that serves the ethnically and culturally diverse communities in Downstate New York. The group reaches out to their members in various languages, including Arabic, Hindi, Korean, Creole, Russian, Chinese and Spanish, thus engaging them better and influencing their health outcomes positively. Around 65 percent of their outreach calls are carried in a foreign language and they have internal staff who speak the native languages of members and they use an interpreter when necessary.

According to Healthfirst’s Deborah Campbell, who is the Vice President for Care Management, their ability to speak in their members’ native languages enable them to create care plans that support their members’ ethnic and cultural needs while heightening their lines of communication.

If health plans could identify people who are linguistically and culturally challenged and have plans in place to lower those barriers, they would be able to improve the satisfaction level of their members and conversely improve their health outcomes.

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