Humana Inc. has just a few questions for you and your answers could help the company make healthier communities.
Since 2014, the Louisville insurer has been calling its members and asking the following four questions. How would you answer?
- Would you say that in general your health is excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor?
- Now, thinking about your physical health, which includes physical illness and injury, for how many days during the past 30 days was your physical health not good?
- Now, thinking about your mental health, which includes stress, depression, and problems with emotions, for how many days during the past 30 days was your mental health not good?
- During the past 30 days, for about how many days did poor physical or mental health keep you from doing your usual activities, such as self-care, work, or recreation?
The questions were developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . Humana is using them in a survey, called “Healthy Days,” which is given to members over the phone, using voice-activated technology.
So far, the company has surveyed about 300,000 members in the individual, group and Medicare business segments, and it has learned a lot from the answers.
“Understanding how people feel, both mentally and physically, help Humana identify segments of our membership who have some of the greatest health care needs,” Humana strategic consultant Laura Happe said in an email. “And understanding those needs empowers us to work with individuals, care providers and communities to remove barriers, close gaps in care, and ultimately increase the number of healthy days.”
Happe, who holds a doctorate in pharmacy and a master’s degree in public health, worked with others on a peer-reviewed study of the collected data, called “Leveraging Health-Related Quality of Life in Population Health Management: The Case for Healthy Days.” The results were published earlier this month in the journal Population Health Management.
Humana partnered with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the CDC, and Columbia University School of Nursing and Mailman School of Public Health for that study. They found that the measures in the self-reported Healthy Days survey were clearly associated with chronic conditions.
When Humana knows what contributes to poor population health in a community, it can help make it better, she said. After seeing that respiratory issues were a problem in Louisville, she said, Humana partnered with the Air Louisville and Propeller Health initiatives to improve air quality.
Those initiatives are part an effort at Humana to work with communities to improve their overall health by 20 percent by the year 2020. In an op-ed he wrote for Forbes, CEO Bruce Broussard called this a “bold goal” that Humana had adopted as its “overall North Star.”
Date: April 22, 2016