From offering mental health services to all members to enhancing internal workflows through data management, here are eight recent partnerships between payers and other companies:

1. Oscar Health and Medecision: The payer announced a partnership with the digital care management company to improve Oscar employees’ workflow and efficiency using technology and data.
2. Molina Healthcare and WEconnect Health Management: The payer is expanding mobile substance use recovery support to Medi-Cal beneficiaries through WEconnect. The mobile app delivers key resources to a patient’s phone, sends daily reminders, medical appointment alerts and rewards milestones. Patients have access to mobile recovery meetings and peer recovery support services.
3. Accelerate Health Equity initiative: Independence Blue Cross is partnering with health systems and public entities to boost health equity and outcomes in Philadelphia County through pilot programs.
4. Aetna and Grow Therapy: The payer is partnering with Grow Therapy to provide in-network mental healthcare benefits to all 87 million Aetna beneficiaries.
5. Optima Health and FinFit: Optima and fintech company FinFit are partnering to provide Medicaid enrollees with access to financial management resources.
6. Florida Blue Medicare and Emcara Health: Florida Blue is partnering with Franklin, Tenn.-based Emcara to offer house calls from primary care providers to Florida members. In-home services offered will include exams, tests, vaccinations, imaging and access to physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, community health workers and mental health professionals.
7. CommonSpirit Health and Pathways Community HUB Institute: Chicago-based CommonSpirit is partnering with PCHI to implement an outcome-based payment model and community care system navigation model in six communities.
8. Four payers and Bicycle Health: Molina Healthcare, McLaren Health Plan, UnitedHealthcare Community Plan and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas are partnering with Boston-based Bicycle Health to offer opioid use treatments under Medicaid managed care plans.

Source: Beckers Payer

Patients have long desired a more personalized healthcare experience. They want to be able to participate in their own health journey, engage in convenient care options and communicate with their providers in a personalized way through their preferred channel. For healthcare systems, meeting these consumer needs has become more urgent as organizations look toward recovery post-COVID-19 in terms of both financial health and staffing concerns.

Consumer expectations are being molded by convenience at levels not experienced before, think Netflix and Amazon. Now, these expectations are transferring to healthcare. According to Salesforce, 40% of consumers say communications from the healthcare and life sciences industries feel relevant, with 69% saying one extraordinary experience raises their expectations of other companies. As healthcare consumerism grows, there is an expectation that health systems and providers should evolve to meet patients where they are when they need them via the communication channel they prefer. Engaged patients can translate to more participation in their own care, which in turn can lead to better overall health and lower costs.

In order to shift healthcare toward a patient-centric model, there must be synergy between payers, providers and patients; technology is the bridge that can help bring all three together. Health systems and providers are now starting to see the value in customer relationship management (CRM) tools to engage patients in a personalized way and empower them to become active participants in their health.

When evaluating a CRM solution, there are multiple use cases that should be considered. By employing a clinically-informed CRM, organizations can derive insights from both clinical and engagement data. This type of data-driven solution helps provide a more holistic view of the patient and can enable providers to identify patterns and insights to aid in anticipating future patient needs and optimizing the way they engage with their patients.

Drew Fennell, chief communications and experience officer at Newark, DE-based ChristianaCare, found that their system acknowledged the foundational importance of personalization, patient engagement and activation.

“The focus of marketing communications is no longer about touting your accolades and maximizing heads in beds and patient panels, it’s about using those communications to deliver healthcare and educating and empowering our patients to become active participants in their care and their health journey,” she said.

According to a study published in Health Affairs, an estimated 92% of people age 35+ don’t complete all preventive care recommendations. “A clinically informed CRM empowers organizations to leverage data, technology and digital tools to identify specific populations with an unmet care gap and engage with them in a targeted and personalized way to encourage completion of a specific action,” Leslie Breer, senior director at Cerner, observes.

Managing patients before they become high-risk by closing discrepancies between recommended levels of care and the care they receive is crucial for successful population health management and the disproportionate share of medical costs that are associated with high-risk patients.

Source: Patient Engagement HIT

About three-quarters of White patients have access to a doctor of the same race, but only one in five Black patients can say the same, a medical workforce diversity trend that researchers from the Urban Institute said is hampering health equity efforts.

This comes as separate research indicates that visiting with a provider of the same race can improve patient experience, particularly for patients of color. A lengthy history of maltreatment for populations of color, as well as implicit bias and denial of patient pain and experience has resulted in limited patient trust among Black and Brown people, the researchers said.

“Perceptions of a shared identity between patients and their health care providers could be one way to improve the patient-provider relationship and foster trust and better communication,” the researchers wrote.

Particularly, the researchers cited studies indicating racial and language concurrence between patient and provider can improve patient access to and engagement in care, better patient experience scores, and better patient reports of clinical quality.

But that ideal of patient-provider racial concordance isn’t usually happening, at least for racial and ethnic minorities. While 73.8 percent of White patients said they are the same race as their healthcare providers, only 22.2 percent of Black patients said the same. About a third (34.4 percent) of patients of other races said they are also the same race as their healthcare providers.

For Latino patients, having a provider who’s both the same race and speaks the same language is also a rarity. About a quarter of Latino patients said they are the same race as their provider, and 29 percent said they’re the same ethnicity. It’s even harder for Latino patients to see a provider who speaks the same language; 23.1 percent said they have a clinician who is the same race/ethnicity and who speaks to them in their preferred language.

That language concordance has a tangible through line to patient experience and outcomes. Patients who do not speak English as their preferred language may experience limited health literacy and have healthcare navigation challenges. November 2020 research found that patients who speak Spanish as their preferred language said the patient intake process was hard, and other said they have to feign understanding of medical concepts.

None of that is conducive to a positive patient experience of good clinical outcomes, experts agree.

Limited language and racial concordance could be due to a vastly under-diversified healthcare workforce, a problem which stems back to medical education, the researchers said. It wasn’t until 1964 that Black people could gain admission to predominantly White medical schools, making it hard for them to pursue their MDs and creating a largely non-Hispanic White workforce.

And today, the high cost of tuition, access to undergraduate education and prerequisite, and limited guidance and support during the admissions process also serve as barriers to medical school. That lack of diversity also expands to other clinicians, like nurses, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants.

“Diversifying the teams who facilitate or provide care to people of color and patients with limited English proficiency could further improve culturally and linguistically effective care,” the researchers wrote. “Given the greater diversity among health care technicians and support staff, such as medical assistants, providing more pathways for these professionals to obtain medical degrees or other advanced training could be an efficient way to diversify the physician workforce.”

Building up a diverse medical workforce cannot happen overnight, the researchers acknowledged, but near-term changes can help promote equity today. Emphasizing health equity and cultural competency may improve patient experiences even when racial concordance cannot be attained, the researchers said.

Additionally, expanding access to credible interpretive services—not relying on family members for interpretation—can support patients with limited English proficiency.

“Stronger enforcement of language access regulations and higher reimbursement for medical interpretation services by health insurance payers could improve language access in health care,” the researchers recommended.

“Improving multilingual capabilities among health care workers is another way to bridge language gaps,” the researchers added in conclusion. “Although some medical schools recommend students be fluent in a language other than English, making this a requirement or a heavily positively weighted factor for medical school admissions could also help diversify the languages spoken in the health care workforce.”

Source: PatientEngagementHIT