National Minority Health Month (NMHM) is an annual observance that builds awareness about health disparities that persist among Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian-American/Pacific Islander, Native American/Indigenous, and other minority communities across the United States.
Beyond awareness, it's an opportunity to address unmet health needs and strengthen the capacity of local communities to eliminate the disproportionate burden of premature death and preventable illness on minority populations through prevention, early detection, and control of disease complications. Although the United States boasts the highest per capita spending on healthcare in the world, we fare worse in health outcomes than countries with much lower levels of healthcare spending and similar levels of wealth on a range of health outcomes. The differences in outcomes are even more stark when considering the health of minority communities.
Awareness raised during NMHM is important, however our real work lies in taking action to improve health outcomes. As Humana's Chief Health Equity Officer, I lead company-wide efforts to improve access to and quality of care and address barriers to healthy living. This is part of Humana’s commitment to enabling an equitable healthcare ecosystem where every person has a fair, just, and dignified opportunity to reach their full health potential. In observance of National Minority Health Month this past April, we focused our efforts on finding new ways to engage all employees in advancing health equity year-round. Company-wide action to advance health equity spreads accountability across the organization and allows us to benefit from the diverse perspectives and specialized expertise of our talented workforce, while fostering innovative solutions to improve health outcomes for our diverse member, employee and patient populations. One example of how we are equipping our employees to take action is our recent launch of a Humana developed online health literacy basics training, which provides our associates at all levels with tools and resources to identify and support members and patients with limited health literacy. Anyone in the company can access the modules and learn on demand at their own pace. Additionally, through a partnership with Duos (a technology-enabled service provider) and USAA, our team recently launched a pilot to improve health outcomes and reduce disparities for Louisiana-based Veterans with chronic conditions.
Year round, Humana works to achieve health equity through a range of initiatives, tools, and community-based partnerships. In 2023, we screened over 1.8 million members across Medicare Advantage (MA), Medicaid and commercial plans for health-related social needs including food insecurity, housing insecurity and transportation barriers. The information enabled social risk-informed care coordination and connection to supportive benefits and resources, including roughly 282,000 Humana Community Navigator referrals for social needs that are critical to overall health. To help address health-related social needs our most vulnerable members face, we expanded our Healthy Food Cards benefit, now called the Healthy Options Card, which helps members pay for essential living expenses like eligible groceries, over the counter (OTC) products, utilities, rent, pet care and more, to support their health and quality of life.
The insights gained from the screening described above, as well as other member touchpoints, are included in our advanced data ecosystem. Through tools such as our internal Population Health Analytics Suite (PHAS) employees can access de-identified, population-level data that illuminates opportunities to improve care, allocate resources and programming and enable measurement on our progress to advance health equity and mitigate health disparities. Our internally designed health equity measurements as well as our externally shared health disparities measure for Medicare Advantage plans enable us to take a data-driven approach to disparity focused initiatives and track progress over time.
We also offer learning opportunities to all employees year round and on demand to better inform them about issues that influence health inequity. One example of this is a cultural humility and implicit bias curriculum that our Health Equity & Social Impact team designed and piloted in partnership with our Humana Health Horizons Ohio Medicaid colleagues. The curriculum improves cultural competency for member and patient facing employees to deepen understanding of the diverse needs of patients and members and ensure the highest level of care. When surveyed about the training, 93% believed the training gave them skills to identify and interrupt bias when it occurs. The training will be expanded to other Humana Medicaid markets over the course of this year. Similarly, Humana Healthy Horizons of Louisiana partnered with Rhodes College to develop anti-bias training for employees and Medicaid providers in Louisiana to build the knowledge and skills necessary to objectively understand what social determinants of health are, how health disparities came to be, and how to recognize implicit bias.
We believe community-specific knowledge and action are key to improving health outcomes, especially in communities where health disparities are most pronounced and there are stark differences in both quality of life and longevity between those from majority and minority racial/ethnic groups. Because of this, we collaborate with community-based organizations across the country, and in 2023, awarded 39 mini-grants to such organizations promoting equity in health on the ground. We also made a significant investment in the Greater Philadelphia area through a partnership with Thomas Jefferson University which included $3 million to deploy data analytics and advance research to expand focused interventions, narrow health disparities and improve access to care for patients; and $12 million to endow three professorships focused on population health and advancing health equity in the region.
To learn more about how Humana is advancing health equity for the members, patients, and communities it serves, please read Humana’s Impact Report.
Dr. J. Nwando Olayiwola, MD, MPH, FAAFP, is Senior Vice President and Chief Health Equity Officer at Humana.