Working to Meet Patients’ Language Needs

Our quality improvement efforts are designed to help 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 the population in our service area and compares them to the data that practitioners report on their network applications. Our 2019 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:
Arabic	Allegheny, Erie	—
Chinese (including Mandarin and Cantonese)	Allegheny, Centre, Westmoreland	—
French, Haitian, and Cajun	Allegheny	—
German or Other West Germanic	Allegheny, Centre, Crawford, Erie, Mercer, Westmoreland	Indiana, Somerset,
Korean	Allegheny	Centre
Other Asian Languages	Allegheny, Centre	—
Other Indo-European	Allegheny, Centre, Erie, Washington, Westmoreland	Beaver
Russian, Polish, or Slavic	Allegheny, Centre, Erie	—
Spanish	Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Cambria, Centre, Clearfield,  Erie, Fayette, Washington, Westmoreland	—
Tagalog	Allegheny	—
Vietnamese	Allegheny	—

• The above data is from the 2013-2017 U.S. Census -American Community Survey Five-Year Estimates.
• This information is based on county population and not Highmark membership population.

In addition, our telephone translation vendor provided a breakdown of all calls Highmark Member Service (customer service) representatives received during the year that required interpreter services. In 2018, Member Service received 24,584 calls in all service areas (a 38.2 percent decrease from 2017) from members speaking 58 different languages. The largest percentage of calls (90.3 percent) was from members speaking Spanish. The total number of calls serviced for Spanish was 22,205.