Humana's Your Practice

Humana Promotes
Equal Care for Members

Dear Physician and Office Staff:

It would be great if everybody received the same quality health care regardless of his or her race, language or socioeconomic status. Unfortunately, we know that snot the case. Two hallmark studies over the last decade — one from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and one from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) — have clearly shown that health care disparities do indeed exist.

The AHRC's 2006 National Health Quality and National Healthcare Disparities report, for example, points out the following.

Blacks are 16 percent more likely to receive poorer quality care than whites.
Hispanics are 20 percent more likely to receive poorer quality care than whites.
Sixty-five percent of whites report being "very satisfied" with the quality of their health care in the past two years, compared to 61 percent of African Americans, 56 percent of Hispanics and 45 percent of Asian Americans.

The report also documents disparities in obesity and asthma treatments, hospice care and even overall patient safety.

No single strategy can eliminate these gaps in care. There is no magic solution.

But we can't be paralyzed by the complexity of the issue, either. We owe it our members and our patients to roll up our sleeves and get to work on this problem, no matter how difficult or how uncomfortable it might be.

As you may have noted in previous quarters of this magazine, Humana recently launched its Clinical Disparities and Cultural Diversity (CDCD) program. This program includes a number of initiatives you'll be learning more about.

The first initiative is to collect data about race, ethnicity and primary language from our members. By collecting this data, we can better quantify the problem and develop strategies to address it. Of course, not everybody is comfortable supplying personal information to us. We will be educating our members as best we can about the importance of collecting this data. We hope you will, too.

In fact, education is another major component of our CDCD program. For example, Humana has a new section on its Web site that includes links to a variety of CDCD resources, including the IOM and AHRC reports. To find this information, go to the provider area of Humana.com and click on "Tools & Resources," "Provider Tools," and "Clinical & Healthcare Resources." Once there, you will also see a link to the U.S. Office of Minority Health (www.thinkculturalhealth.org) where you can take a free cultural competence training module worth 9 CMEs.

You can also find a link to the National Health Plan Collaborative ( NHPC). Humana recently joined the NHPC, which is a coalition of 10 health plans that aims to reduce racial and ethnic disparities and improve U.S. health care.

However, even an organization with as much credibility and clout as the NHPC can't resolve the disparities in the health care system by itself. I encourage you to join with us by doing everything you can to promote equal care.

Sincerely,