Working to Meet Patients’ Language Needs

Our quality improvement efforts are designed to ensure quality care and member satisfaction. To achieve these goals, we continually review the aspects of our plan that affect member care and satisfaction and look for ways to improve them. One way to do that is to share details with network practitioners about the languages patients in their area may speak and to provide information on available interpreting services.

Highmark annually assesses languages spoken by population in our service area and compares them to the data that practitioners report on their network applications. Our 2020 analysis concluded that the following counties had greater than 1,000 residents speaking the following primary languages:

Language:	Counties in which language is spoken, and PCPs are available who speak the language:	Counties in which language is spoken, and there are no PCPs available who speak the language:
Arabic	New Castle	—
Chinese (including Mandarin and Cantonese)	New Castle	—
French, Haitian, and Cajun	Kent, New Castle, Sussex	—
German or Other West Germanic	New Castle	Kent
Korean	New Castle	—
Other Asian and Pacific Island	New Castle	—
Other Indo-European	Kent, New Castle, Sussex	—
Russian, Polish, or Other Slavic	New Castle	—
Spanish	Kent, New Castle, Sussex	—
Tagalog (including Filipino)	New Castle	—

 

• The above data are from the 2013-2017 U.S. Census -American Community Survey Five-Year Estimates.
• This information is based on county population and not Highmark membership population.

In addition, our telephone translation vendor provided a breakdown of all calls Highmark customer service representatives received during the year that required interpreter services. In 2019, Member Service received 26,045 calls (a 5.9 percent increase from 2018) from members speaking 58 different languages. The largest percentage of calls (90.2 percent) was from members speaking Spanish. The total number of calls serviced for Spanish was 23,482.