$4.8M :: Low Health Literacy Costly for Payers, Health Plan Simplification Needed via Patient Engagement Hi.

Low Health Literacy Costly for Payers, Health Plan Simplification Needed

Patient Engagement Hit: 9.13 2018 by Sara Heath

Low patient health literacy costs US healthcare payers nearly $4.8 billion in administrative costs each year, suggesting a need for health plan simplification, according to a new report from Accenture.

While it is important for healthcare professionals to ensure patients are knowledgeable and engaged enough to interact with the medical and payer industry, it is also incumbent upon payers to simplify their benefits programs. It should not require a patient to be a healthcare expert to navigate the currently convoluted system, the Accenture report contended.

“Instead of forcing people to continue to battle complexity, payers can invest in simplifying the ways consumers interact and engage with healthcare,” wrote report authors Jean-Pierre Stephan, Loren McCaghy, and Michael Brombach.

“Because it’s not Americans who are failing in healthcare system literacy. It’s the complexity of the system that’s failing them,” added Stephan, McCaghy, and Brombach, who are Accenture’s managing director of CRM solutions, director of consumer engagement & product insight, and manager of Accenture strategy, respectively.

Using a patient health literacy index, the researchers determined that half of US patients have low health literacy – 33 percent have no experience with the healthcare system, while 19 percent are considered healthcare industry novices.

When a patient has low health literacy, she struggles to make informed decisions about her care; does not have the self-efficacy to manage referrals, medications, and complex provider systems; and may not know the right questions to ask of providers or assert her needs as a patient.

Additionally, patients with limited health literacy may not know how to fill out administrative paperwork, leading to both missing and redundant information. Patients may not understand their medical bills, their benefits packages, and their own financial responsibility.

That lack of patient knowledge comes at a price, the researchers revealed. Patients with lower health literacy contact customer services departments 13 percent more often than patients with relatively high health literacy.

With increased customer service calls come higher administrative costs. Health payers and employers spend an average of $26 more on patients with low health literacy, totaling at $4.8 billion across the industry each year.

Patients with comparatively high health literacy only cost healthcare payers $1.4 billion annually, the report authors noted, a difference of $3.4 billion.  READ MORE >>

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