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 2018 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: |
African Languages | — | Lancaster |
Arabic | Dauphin, Lehigh | — |
French-(incl. Patois, Cajun) | Berks, Dauphin, Lancaster, Lehigh, Monroe, York | — |
German | Berks, Cumberland, Lancaster, Lehigh, Northampton, York | — |
Hindi | Lehigh | — |
Italian | Berks, Lackawanna, Luzerne, Northampton | — |
Other Asian Languages | Cumberland, Lehigh | — |
Other Indic Languages | Dauphin, Lancaster, Northampton | Lackawanna |
Other Indo-European | — | Berks |
Other West Germanic Languages | — | Berks, Centre, Clinton, Cumberland, Dauphin, Juniata, Lancaster, Lebanon, Mifflin, Northumberland, Snyder, Union |
Polish | Luzerne, Monroe | — |
Russian | — | Lancaster |
Spanish | Adams, Berks, Carbon, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Lackawanna, Lancaster, Lebanon, Lehigh, Luzerne, Lycoming, Monroe, Northampton, Northumberland, Pike, Schuylkill, Union, Wayne, York | — |
Vietnamese | Berks, Dauphin, Lancaster, Lehigh | — |
In addition, our telephone translation vendor provided a breakdown of all calls Highmark customer service representatives received during the year (in all of Highmark's and its insurer affiliates' service areas) that required interpreter services. In 2017, Member Service received 39,799 calls (a 16.7 percent decrease from 2016) from members speaking 77 different languages. The largest percentage of calls (88.3 percent) was from members speaking Spanish. The total number of calls serviced for Spanish was 34,970.