In early August, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island (BCBSRI) earned Health Equity Accreditation from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). This prestigious honor is another important distinction that gives us an actionable framework for our health equity efforts and helps separate our plans from our competitors. We earned this status, which is effective for three years, on our commercial and on-exchange PPO and POS plans.

BCBSRI is currently the only commercial health insurer serving Rhode Islanders – and one of just 11 insurance plans across New England – to achieve NCQA Health Equity Accreditation. Health equity is a journey we’ve been on for several years. Last year, to strengthen our health equity initiatives, we decided as a company to pursue this accreditation for the first time – in fact, it was one of our key 2024 priorities as part of our strategic plan.

Specifically, Health Equity Accreditation focuses on the foundation of our health equity work: building an internal culture that supports our external efforts; collecting data that helps us create and offer language services as well as provider networks that consider individuals’ cultural and linguistic needs; and identifying opportunities to reduce health inequities, improve health outcomes, and reduce costs.

Improving our health equity efforts requires even stronger partnerships with various stakeholders within the healthcare industry, including employers, regulators, community-based organizations, and of course with you, our participating providers. It’s important for us to be able to assess our network’s ability to meet the cultural needs of our members. One way we’ve addressed this is through the cultural competency surveys we send to you periodically. The results of those surveys help us determine what types of resources we need to provide you with to help promote health equity in your practice.

We’ve been asking members to self-report their race, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, and gender identification (collectively, “REL/SOGI”) data, which helps us better understand the languages they speak and comprehend. Additionally, we share those members’ language preferences with our PCMH providers. Concurrently, earlier this year we began adding provider race and ethnicity to our Provider Directory.

When you update your race, ethnicity, and languages spoken for your providers and staff (in the “Provider Tools” section of our Provider portal on BCBSRI.com), our members are better able to select providers who may better meet their cultural and linguistic needs. In that section, you will also find health equity and cultural competency resources, including language assistance resources (now available telephonically through TransPerfect for BCBSRI commercial members who need an interpreter), cultural competency trainings, and guides to help address disparities.

So, our ask of you is simple – please continue to support our health equity efforts by responding to our cultural competency surveys, use our language tools and resources, update/share race and ethnicity data for your practice and staff, and stay up to date with all our health equity initiatives through Provider Update and other channels. As always, thank you for all you do every day to keep our members safe and healthy.