The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded a $400,000 grant to WellPoint to launch a health disparities pilot program to help Hispanics and African Americans better manage their diabetes.
"This grant will assist WellPoint in its ongoing efforts to bridge cultural healthcare gaps in diabetes and improve the lives of our Hispanic and African American members," said WellPoint Chief Medical Officer Sam Nussbaum. "By sharing our programs and our results, it also confirms our commitment to address health inequities – not only those that impact our members, but those that affect all Americans."
The Indianapolis-based insurer will conduct the pilot in California, New York, Ohio, Virginia and Georgia. The pilot is an expansion of an Anthem Blue Cross program that won a "Best of Blue" award earlier this year for its focus on providing diabetes care and treatment information specifically tailored to the Hispanic and African American communities.
WellPoint's proposal was one of four grants awarded by the foundation's "Finding Answers: Disparities Research for Change" program, which was created with the goal of sharing what programs and approaches work and don't work in reducing racial and ethnic healthcare disparities. The broader goal is to develop successful programs that can be replicated in other communities to reduce health disparities in the United States.
"The new federal healthcare law provides dramatic expansions in access to care, but we need to ensure that care is high-quality care for every patient every time they see a provider. These grantees will help the nation reduce stubborn disparities in care," said Marshall H. Chin, professor of medicine at the University of Chicago's Department of Medicine and Center for Health and the Social Sciences, who serves as the director of the Finding Answers program.
The pilot, conducted in association with Anthem's Georgia affiliate earlier this year, studied more than 4,000 African American and Hispanic members in California and Georgia. It focused on creative and culturally appropriate ways to communicate with members – including providing information on how members could reach out to local churches to share these messages with others and providing bilingual Spanish print fotonovelas, a photographic comic strip version of a soap opera. The pilot also provided diabetes educational materials that included ways to substitute ingredients in favorite ethnic meals to make them healthier.
"Even over the short term, we saw small but promising increases in disease management engagement among African American and Hispanic members," said Terri Amano, senior product manager for Anthem's Programs in Clinical Excellence. "We see this pilot as an important first step in helping our diverse members make important changes to their health and helping to bridge the cultural care gaps that exist today."
The new program, slated to last three years, will also study the application of behavioral economics by offering financial incentives to members who reduce and maintain blood sugar levels within healthy ranges at two different points within the eight-month-long intervention. The team also will assess whether improvements in diabetes control are sustained after the financial incentives are removed.
The program will be conducted in collaboration with Jose Escarce, MD, and Arleen Brown, MD, of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research in the School of Medicine at UCLA. WellPoint will work with physician practices in the five states to identify interested members with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes.