Health Literacy

Health literacy isn’t just about the ability to read; it means being able to obtain, process, and understand the basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.

Studies have shown the future costs of low health literacy could run as high as $3.6 trillion, and a disturbing number of Americans have trouble understanding and using health information. Patients with limited literacy also have higher rates of hospitalization and use of emergency services.

Advancing health literacy is one of the ways WellPoint fulfills our “Customer First” core value and is an important component of our effort to help reduce health care costs.

Research and Assessments

AHIP Task Force

WellPoint is an active member of the Health Literacy Task Force run by America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), which promotes health literacy programs. The task force has developed a health literacy toolkit that was distributed to health plans in 2010. In 2011, WellPoint was featured in the AHIP publication Health Literacy and America's Health Insurance Plans: Laying the Foundation and Beyond for its Plain Language initiative.

AHIP Survey

WellPoint participated in AHIP’s assessment survey to establish benchmarks in measuring our health literacy efforts.

Health Access Project

WellPoint was part of the Health Access Project sponsored by University of California Berkeley’s Health Research for Action and California’s Office of the Patient Advocate. The project identified a number of barriers to health literacy: patients’ inability to understand health care materials, fill out complicated forms correctly, understand health care benefits and medical instructions and navigate the health system effectively. It also addressed the issue of patients’ use of emergency rooms for problems that are not urgent. The group’s recommendations include improved use of easily accessible educational materials in newsletters for patients.

Educating Professionals

Health Literacy Summit

In collaboration with Wisconsin Literacy, Inc., WellPoint sponsored the third biennial Wisconsin Health Literacy Summit in 2009. Six plenary speakers and 28 health literacy workshops and information sessions covered topics such as “Health Literacy: A Key Component of Quality Health Care,” “Health Literacy for Nurses — Tools for Effective Communication,” and “Estimating Costs and Mapping Health Literacy.”

Health Literacy Seminars

WellPoint offers health literacy workshops as part of the training program for Medical Management nurses.

Educating Associates

Plain Language

WellPoint launched a Plain Language initiative, designed to help us communicate more clearly with our customers. It includes training and tools on how to write in plain language; it also identifies readability grade levels for brokers, employers and members, and provides the software to test reading levels. Our Plain Language Squad is on hand to offer writing resources, promote Plain Language training and tools and identify opportunities where we can simplify communications.

As a result of our Plain Language Initiative, WellPoint received the 2011 National Health Literacy Innovators Champion Award for its “demonstrated commitment to excellence in health literacy within an organization.”

Improving Communications

We have collaborated with six health literacy organizations to conduct panel discussions and webinars with WellPoint associates on how low health literacy affects health care and what we can do to make verbal and written member materials easier to understand. WellPoint associates were able to access the knowledge, experience and resources of health literacy experts to help with their strategy development.

Culturally Appropriate Communications

WellPoint has conducted webinars that allowed associates from different departments to share best practices related to health literacy with others within the company. The presenters covered program strategies for provider training, producing easy-to-understand and culturally appropriate materials for Hispanic and African American members and making plain language part of our corporate culture.

Educating Members

Multicultural Communications

WellPoint is committed to getting our health care message across with clarity and accuracy to our diverse membership. We have worked with a multicultural health care communications company to develop linguistically and culturally appropriate member materials throughout WellPoint, collaborating on member outreach scripts, a cancer survivorship toolkit and online articles, and developing a Spanish messaging style guide.

Educating the Public

In 2011, WellPoint presented at the 10th Annual Health Literacy Conference in Irvine, CA, sponsored by the Institute for Healthcare Advancement. The opportunity allowed us to share our health literacy efforts, best practices and lessons learned in the last decade with professionals in the medical, educational, pharmaceutical, academic, research and library fields.