Four years ago, PacifiCare Health Systems Inc. decided it wasn’t doing enough to attract minorities to its health plans.
Chief Executive Howard Phanstiel had just taken over the company and was pushing for more plans targeting ethnic groups, many of which have health problems specific to them.
“We want to eliminate the disparity in access to healthcare coverage to treat disease such as diabetes, heart disease and mental illness,” Phanstiel said in a statement.
Phanstiel also saw the potential membership gains from these growing minority groups.
Cypress-based PacifiCare’s latest ethnic program: Asian American Markets, which follows existing plans for Hispanics and African-Americans.
PacifiCare has 3 million members in its health plans that are directed at employers and Medicare recipients. The Asian American program targets one of the fastest-growing demographics in the eight Western states that PacifiCare operates in.
There are 4.1 million Asian Americans in the region, about 53% of all Asian Americans in the U.S.
Asian American Markets lets customers speak in Mandarin and Cantonese, with Korean and Vietnamese to be added soon. It offers coverage for acupuncture and chiropractic services and has online doctor directories in Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese.
“A lot of (Asian Americans) are really first-generation immigrants that don’t speak English and prefer a lot of in-language information about health,” said James Qu, project manager for PacifiCare’s Asian American Markets program.
In February, PacifiCare hired Los Angeles-based AAAZa Inc. to handle its $850,000 Asian American advertising account. The ad shop is charged with raising awareness of PacifiCare’s Asian American program among potential customers, doctors, brokers and employers.
PacifiCare also plans to market the program with its Latino Health Solutions unit,PacifiCare’s first ethnic initiative. Qu and Russ Bennett, vice president in charge of Latino Health Solutions, said the company’s found that a lot of Asian American-owned businesses have many Latino workers.
PacifiCare’s largest ethnic program is Latino Health Solutions, which debuted in 2002. Latino Health Solutions includes a Spanish-language Web site, bilingual customer service lines, a directory of Spanish-speaking network doctors and a directory of network doctors’ offices where Spanish is spoken.
PacifiCare launched Latino Health Solutions after realizing that Latino members were present “in just about every product and in every geography that we serve,” Bennett said.
About 59% of U.S. Latinos live in PacifiCare’s eight-state region, Bennett said. The company estimated that 500,000 of its more than 3 million members are Latino. (A company spokeswoman said PacifiCare didn’t track Asian American or African-American members).
“There’s also a realization that many of our Latino members,and you’ll see that in the other ethnicities as well,have specific disease or illness profiles that we can better serve if we target them,” Bennett said.
PacifiCare wasn’t the first health plan operator to target Latinos.
In 2000, Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. teamed with Tenet Healthcare Corp., which owns five Orange County hospitals, and others to create Salud con Health Net. The plan includes cross-border care through a contract with Sistemas Medicos Nacionales SA de CV, a Mexican healthcare service plan.
Salud con Health Net, however, wasn’t formally rolled out until November in OC, which has some 1 million Latinos, up 31% in the past decade, according to Health Net.
Salud con Health Net members can receive healthcare from six OC clinics operated by Clinica Medica General and Anaheim General Hospital.
African-American Plan
While Asian and Latino populations generally are larger in PacifiCare’s core service area, the company also has a service plan for African-Americans.
Focusing on diseases such as heart conditions and diabetes, along with access-to-healthcare disparities, PacifiCare launched African American Health Solutions in 2003, said Corliss Hill, manager of business development for the program.
African American Health Solutions primarily is offered in Los Angeles and Dallas, two of the larger cities for PacifiCare. (OC’s black population only is about 2% of the total).
The African-American unit participates in health fairs, working with the American Heart Association on a behavior program designed to stop heart disease, and creates pamphlets and other educational materials to help members manage their families’ health.
African American Health Solutions also works with the American Diabetes Association to pass out information about that condition, which is more common in blacks than other ethnic groups.
Marketing Is a Challenge
One challenge for PacifiCare: Raising awareness of the initiatives among its sales force and healthcare brokers.
Bennett said that he, Hill and Qu often have to ask salespeople if they are letting current and potential customers know about the programs.
“And the salespeople say, ‘Well, if they ask me, I do,'” Bennett said. “And so we say, ‘How are they going to know to ask you if you don’t go out there and promote it?'”
To raise awareness, PacifiCare advertises, and goes to health fairs and other healthcare events. It promotes Latino Health Solutions through a scholarship program.
On the African-American side, Hill said the company works with black churches.
“It’s the focal point of the community,that’s where folks really gather information when it comes to finances, politics, health, family values, you name it,” Hill said.
