A newsletter for Highmark Blue Shield providers in northeastern New York
Issue 6, June 2024
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 provide information on available interpreting services.
Highmark annually assesses languages spoken by population in our service areas and compares them to the data that practitioners report on their network applications. Our 2024 analysis concluded that New York 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 | X | |
| Italian | ✔ | |
| Japanese | ✔ | |
| Khmer | X | |
| Korean | ✔ | |
| Malayalam, Kannada, or another Dravidian | ✔ | |
| Nepali, Marathi, or another Indic | ✔ | |
| Persian | ✔ | |
| Polish | ✔ | |
| Portuguese | X | |
| Punjabi | ✔ | |
| Russian | ✔ | |
| Serbo-Croatian | X | |
| Spanish | ✔ | |
| Swahili or another Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa | ✔ | |
| Tagalog (including Filipino) | ✔ | |
| Tamil | ✔ | |
| Telugu | ✔ | |
| Thai, Lao, or another Tai-Kadai | ✔ | |
| Ukrainian or another Slavic | X | |
| Urdu | ✔ | |
| Vietnamese | ✔ | |
| Yiddish, Pennsylvania Dutch, or another West Germanic | X | |
| Yoruba, Twi, Igbo, or another Western Africa | ✔ |
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 2023, Highmark received 33,914 calls — an increase of 652 from 2022 — from members speaking 71 different languages. The largest percentage of calls (87%) was from members speaking Spanish. The total number of calls serviced for Spanish was 29,382.
