The National Health Plan Collaborative Toolkit

By Richard Shank Asian Couple

The National Health Plan Collaborative has created an online toolkit that seeks to address disparities in health and health care by providing information relevant for health plan providers. The toolkit contains health plan tools, resources, case studies, and examples of best practices in health care disparity reduction. It also provides videos with expert testimony about the importance of reducing health care disparities and implementing high quality interventions. Furthermore, the toolkit provides key knowledge to health plan providers that will help them overcome the cultural, language, and economic barriers of efficient and effective health care delivery. African-American Couple

After a brief introduction to health care disparities, the toolkit discusses the issue of collecting race, ethnicity, and language preference data for health plan providers. Traditionally, health care providers have been fearful of collecting such data because of the mistaken belief that they could be in violation of the Civil Rights Act. However, Title VI of the act allows the collection of such data when and wherever it is used to enhance the Civil Rights Act itself. Accordingly, race, ethnic, and language preference data can and should be collected for the purposes of improving the overall quality of health care delivery to underserved populations.

The toolkit also provides an outline of the business incentives for addressing health care inequalities. Health plan providers have often overlooked the long-term return on investment (ROI) that is provided by addressing health care disparities. For instance, since the ROI of such programs accrues more slowly than more traditional short-term health care investment decisions, insurers have irrationally short-changed themselves. Traditionally, extensive plans covering preventative treatment interventions have been limited to individuals deemed at the lowest risk for chronic and catastrophic disease. Health disparities data reveal that this type of plan disadvantages various racial, ethnic, and language choice groups whose risk factors for chronic disease are higher.

Caucasian Couple

The toolkit authors argue that this type of plan is short-sighted from a business perspective because the overall long-term ROI will be much higher if and when disadvantaged groups are targeted for preventative medical programming. By allowing them broader access to a wider range of care, their usage of far more complex and costly treatments for catastrophic and chronic disease decreases exponentially.

This health plan toolkit outlines in greater detail the business case for addressing disparities at the health care plan level and provides the resources to kick start such an initiative.

For more information, see the toolkit at http://www.rwjf.org.

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