From September 2004 to September 2008, the Center for Health Care Strategies led the National Health Plan Collaborative, a group of 11 national health insurance plans, in a project to reduce disparities in health care, focusing primarily on treatment for diabetes.

The two-phase project was co-funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The effort was largely in response to a 2002 report by the Institute of Medicine that found that minorities are less likely than Whites to receive needed health care and often receive care of lower quality.

Key Results

• Health plans in the collaborative collected race and ethnicity data on their members, linked the information to their data on diabetes care and then conducted an analysis to determine if there were racial or ethnic disparities in care.
• Collaborative members designed and tested pilot projects to reduce disparities in health care for minorities at the provider, member and community levels. For example:
  • Aetna tested an outreach strategy to providers and nurses to improve diabetes screenings for African-American members. As part of the project, Aetna developed a cultural sensitivity training module available to all staff and a nursing education program.
  • CIGNA conducted an extensive analysis of its members with diabetes and tested a disease management program focusing on medication use and compliance. Based on the results, CIGNA developed outreach strategies to improve the care that diabetic members receive.
  • Harvard Pilgrim Health Care tested intervention programs to ensure that diabetic Hispanics receive timely eye exam screenings.
• Despite the health plans' differences in size and organization—and the inherent difficulty collaborating with market competitors—participants derived many benefits from the collaborative, according to a 2006 evaluation by Mathematica Policy Research:
  • "Firms are much more aware of the value of race/ethnicity data in supporting quality improvement efforts targeting racial and ethnic disparities … and now say the goal is to capture race/ethnicity [data] for all of their members."
  • "As firms gained insights on disparities, they began to think more concretely about what they, as firms sponsoring diverse health plans, could do to reduce disparities."

Funding
RWJF supported the project between September 2004 and September 2008 with a grant of $486,257.