Mark Poling | April 15, 2021
America’s vaccine rollout is underway and while it is beginning to pick up steam, there were and continue to be missteps, miscommunications and failures are everywhere you look. The CDC reported in February that only half the doses shipped to states have been administered. Pregnant women have received conflicting advice on getting vaccinated. And Black and Latinx Americans “are falling behind in the nationwide race to get vaccinated against Covid-19,” according to Politico.
These have mostly been treated as logistical problems, but it would be more accurate to call them communication failures. Vaccination information so far has been disorganized, erratic and shrouded in confusion. To find out when and where to get vaccinated, do you go to your local health department’s website? Your pharmacy’s website? Your provider’s website?
Each of those places has vaccine information, to be sure. But none of it is complete or easy to understand. None can tell any individual exactly where they stand in the vaccination hierarchy, when they’ll be eligible for the vaccine and where they should go to get it.
Health plans could provide all of that information. They have the health records, demographic information and in most cases the employment information needed to determine when each of their members’ will be vaccine-eligible. They have the credibility to educate their members on vaccine safety. They could easily collect and curate public-health information to tell members when, where and how to get vaccinated as soon as they’re eligible.
In our work with health plans, I have heard the latest Covid-19 outbreak, and the year ahead, compared to a hurricane. We know it’s coming, but we can only guess what its path will be, whether it will be a Category 2 or a Category 5. But unlike a natural disaster, which is largely out of our control, the insurance industry can do more than forecast the damage from the pandemic. We can help mitigate it – and save millions of lives.
To read the complete article, click here.
