Health Insurance and Insights from Health Literacy Helping Consumers Understand: Proceedings of a Workshop (2017) / Chapter Skim
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5 Successful Efforts to Address Challenges
5 Successful Efforts to Address Challenges
Pages 51-72
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From page 51... ...
Erin Hemlin, national director of training and consumer education at Young Invincibles, discussed the successful strategies her program uses to reach the young and healthy. Robert Krughoff, president of Consumers' Checkbook's Center for the Study of Services, spoke about the tools his organization developed for comparing health plan information.
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From page 52... ...
The organization works in more than 40 states, with a primary focus on health issue campaigns, such as access to dental care, preventing substance abuse, and hospital community health benefit programs. Community Catalyst also supports health system transformations and provides support to health insurance enrollment assisters.
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From page 53... ...
It also provides health literacy and health insurance literacy support, explained Taylor. She noted that the role of assisters is changing as the ACA moves into its fourth year of enrollment.
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From page 54... ...
Assisters also need additional resources on health literacy and health insurance literacy. ATTRACTING THE "YOUNG INVINCIBLES"2 The Young Invincibles, explained Erin Hemlin, is a research and advocacy group that works for the economic advancement of young adults ages 18-34.
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From page 55... ...
The first two National Youth Enrollment Day events attempted to create an atmosphere of celebration and portrayed getting health care as a rite of passage in life. The events featured music and food trucks in addition to having assisters and health care organizations available to help with health and health insurance questions.
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From page 56... ...
To start, Young Invincibles and other organizations focusing on young adults have the experience they gained during the preceding open enrollment periods, as well as the strong partnerships that have developed during the initial years of the ACA. In addition, said Hemlin, young adults attach less political stigma to the ACA and are now seeing health insurance as a validator of adulthood and hearing positive stories from their compatriots who have become newly insured.
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From page 57... ...
"It is going to take work from both consumers and the health care system to build a culture of wellness." Once the focus groups were complete, Young Invincibles created a workshop-based health insurance literacy curriculum that it has been running for several months. These workshops explain health insurance basics and terminology, how to select a doctor from a plan's provider directory and make an appointment, what is free and not free under the provisions of a health plan, and how to choose a plan on one's own.
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From page 58... ...
Most relevant to this conversation, said Robert Krughoff, is the organization's research and user feedback associated with the Guide to Health Plans that it has published for the past 36 years for the eight million employees and retirees covered by the more than 250 plans in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. In addition, Consumers' Checkbook has built and hosted plan comparison tools to serve consumers choosing insurance on exchanges serving five states.
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From page 59... ...
"We run those different probabilities and different profiles of use against the benefit package of each plan and come up with a weighted average for somebody like you." Some tools, he noted, make simplifications that are not helpful and in some cases are misleading. For example, during the first two open enrollment periods, the federally facilitated marketplace sorted plans on the basis of premiums, implying this was the right basis for choosing a plan.
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From page 60... ...
"People do not want to spend a lot of time knowing about insurance," he said. "You want to find a way to figure out the most important things to show people, to make sure they see those things and understand those things." The Consumers' Checkbook tool has users input their age and the age of all family members, their overall self-reported health status, major procedures they know they may need, and financial information related to eligibility for Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, subsidies, and tax credits.
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From page 61... ...
Pow founding the HxRefactored conference to explore the overlap of health and design and address the challenge of using human-centered design to help improve health experiences. This annual conference, held in Boston, attracts some 500 people to explore the relationship between design and topics such as health literacy, behavior change, and health insurance.
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From page 62... ...
It is good business and can be meaningful on the nonprofit and government levels as well," said Cueva. She also noted that organizations tend to follow a pattern where they first think of design as "hitting it with the pretty stick" -- focusing on esthetics and branding only, then turning to what she called stick designs -- ones that hit people over the head with a lack of subtlety, and then come to understand that good design creates intuitive experiences that enable users to accomplish what they want easily, then very mature organizations ultimately end up fostering a culture where the people they serve are at the focus of the design.
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From page 63... ...
Her team is also working with community health plans on member billing to help reduce frustration and help people resolve billing questions. From thousands of interviews with patients, consumers, and health insurance clients, Cueva has identified a few common themes with regard to consumer expectations: • Give me access to the best options to keep me healthy.
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From page 64... ...
As a result, medical bills are filled with jargon that patients cannot understand and are missing key information that would help them understand. Another factor is the lack of understanding about insurance.
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From page 65... ...
I should charge for my time." • "Patients don't want separate bills from the hospital, nursing, doc tors. We want one statement that shows everything we owe for that service." Of the patients responding to the survey, 52 percent did not do anything prior to their health care visit to research the cost of their impending care, and 61 percent rated their medical bills as confusing or very confusing.
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From page 66... ...
LIBRARIES AND LIBRARIANS AS TRUSTED ACA INFORMATION SOURCES6 Beginning the final presentation of this session, Renée Bougard gave an overview of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) , an organization of more than 6,400 members that is administered by eight regional academic health sciences libraries (see Figure 5-3)
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From page 67... ...
"What we really do is provide access through outreach and training, ensuring that everyone in the United States has access to quality health information," she said. "The NN/LM mission and work I will describe today support the National Library of Medicine's goal of ‘Trusted Information Services that Promote Health Literacy and the Reduction of Health Disparities Worldwide.'" Eight Regional Medical Libraries administerthe NN/LM: 1.
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From page 68... ...
When the ACA was signed into law, a national collaboration involving CMS, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, NN/LM, and WebJunction, an online community that supports learning and training for library staff, created online resources and community contacts that library staffs would need to respond to questions regarding health insurance options and health-related questions. A panel session with representatives from the four collaborators was held at the American Library Association conference in June 2013.
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From page 69... ...
NN/LM has a history of collaborating with public libraries and community-based organizations to provide access to quality health information for the public and of promoting health literacy, Bougard noted. The eight Regional Medical Libraries contacted each one of the state libraries in their region to offer training to public libraries on ACA materials and to work with them to train library staff on locating quality health information.
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From page 70... ...
"They have provided the public with information needed to obtain health insurance, and in some cases they have provided the technological means for obtaining health insurance. They have also provided access to quality health information for those individuals who have come to the library seeking information regarding health care issues." She encouraged anyone seeking a potential partner for outreach and education to consider contacting his or her Regional Medical Library for assistance and engaging his or her local public library.
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From page 71... ...
An HHS working group on health literacy put together criteria for the challenge, she said, and the working group screened the entries reducing the 400 applicants to the smaller number that the judges will be reviewing. Cueva added there were as many as 30 organizations, including Community Catalyst, that contributed to creating the challenge.
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From page 72... ...
72 HEALTH INSURANCE AND INSIGHTS FROM HEALTH LITERACY to flow between the provider and insurer rather than between the provider and consumer. "A potent example of this is that you cannot identify your plan in a unique way like you can with the serial number on your TV," said Ellsworth.
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