Our quality improvement efforts are designed to ensure quality care and member satisfaction. To achieve these goals, Highmark continually reviews the aspects of our plan that affect member care and satisfaction and looks 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 populations in our service area and compares them to the data that practitioners report on their network applications. Our 2023 analysis concluded that Pennsylvania had greater than 1,000 residents speaking the following languages:
Languages Spoken | PCPs are available who speak the language | PCPs are not available who speak the language |
Amharic, Somali, or another Afro-Asiatic | ✔ | |
Arabic | ✔ | |
Armenian | ✔ | |
Bengali | ✔ | |
Chinese (including Mandarin and Cantonese) | ✔ | |
French (including Cajun) | ✔ | |
German | ✔ | |
Greek | ✔ | |
Gujarati | ✔ | |
Haitian | X | |
Hebrew | ✔ | |
Hindi | ✔ | |
Ilocano, Samoan, Hawaiian, or another Austronesian | ✔ | |
Italian | ✔ | |
Japanese | ✔ | |
Khmer | X | |
Korean | ✔ | |
Malayalam, Kannada, or another Dravidian | ✔ | |
Nepali, Marathi, or another Indic | ✔ | |
Persian | ✔ | |
Polish | ✔ | |
Portuguese | ✔ | |
Punjabi | ✔ | |
Russian | ✔ | |
Serbo-Croatian | ✔ | |
Spanish | ✔ | |
Swahili or another Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa | ✔ | |
Tagalog (including Filipino) | ✔ | |
Tamil | ✔ | |
Telugu | ✔ | |
Thai, Lao, or another Tai-Kadai | ✔ | |
Ukrainian or another Slavic | ✔ | |
Urdu | ✔ | |
Vietnamese | ✔ | |
Yiddish, Pennsylvania Dutch, or another West Germanic | ✔ | |
Yoruba, Twi, Igbo, or another Western Africa | ✔ |
• The above data is from the 2021 U.S. Census – American Community Survey Five-Year Estimates.
• This information is based on state population and not Highmark membership population.
In addition, our telephone translation vendor provided a breakdown of all calls Highmark customer service representatives received during the year that required interpreter services. In 2022, Highmark received 33,262 calls — an increase of 1,436 from 2021 — from members speaking 66 different languages. The largest percentage of calls (89.1%) was from members speaking Spanish. The total number of calls serviced for Spanish was 29,637.