Happy New Year! As I’ve discussed before, including in last month’s column, one of our key initiatives for 2024 is furthering our efforts to create more equitable care. That column outlines some of our specific priorities for this year, and here I wanted to delve a little further into one of them – our active pursuit of National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) Health Equity Accreditation, for the first time. We worked hard on this throughout 2023 and expect to submit all required documentation to NCQA in May 2024.

Achieving NCQA Health Equity Accreditation would further demonstrate our commitment to health equity and ensure that our members have access to quality and equitable care. There are several significant benefits to pursuing this important accreditation. It will help us further align our leadership, staff, and culture with principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), operating from an equity lens in all our decision making and throughout our operations – with the ultimate goal of improving health outcomes and reducing disparities in healthcare.

Additionally, it will demonstrate our commitment to improving health equity for our members and the healthcare system, encourage input and invite collaboration from the community, more closely align us with other Blues plans that have this accreditation, and help us keep pace with other health insurers who also have it. Additionally, it will be a requirement by the middle of 2026 for plans to meet our state Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner’s (OHIC’s) affordability standards, as well as for participation in Medicaid.

A significant part of our commitment to health equity is building an enhanced system and network to be in a position to better address the health inequities we’re looking to improve. One of the ways we’re doing that is by collecting member data related to race, ethnicity, language, gender identity, and sexual orientation (REL/SOGI). Understanding and meeting the linguistic needs of our members is a shared concern of BCBSRI and our contracted providers. Therefore, we will support our providers in this effort by offering the use of a telephone language translation service for use with BCBSRI commercial members who have in-person interpreter needs. Be on the lookout for more information about this in the weeks and months ahead. 

Similarly, we’re also committed to making race and ethnicity data from our participating providers available to our members so that we can better understand their healthcare needs and ensure that services are provided to them in a culturally responsive way. Soon we will begin publishing that provider data in our Find a Doctor provider directory on bcbsri.com, in addition to the languages spoken, which are displayed today. The race and ethnicity data we’ll publish has been provided by providers themselves, when voluntarily disclosed on the Council for Affordable Quality HealthCare (CAQH) database. (And if you haven’t done so yet, we absolutely encourage you to do so!)

Look for additional updates on this initiative – as well as other efforts we have underway to improve health equity – in future columns. In the meantime, and as always, thank you for your partnership and all you do to help our members stay safe and healthy.