Insurer reduces healthcare disparities after tying executive bonuses to the issue

A California-based Medicare Advantage plan is touting its success at improving health disparities by tying its executives’ bonuses to the issue (Source: “How one insurer tied executive performance bonus to reducing healthcare disparities,” MedCity News, July 25).

One aspect SCAN Health Plan looked at was medication adherence among its members, numbering  270,000 across Arizona, California and Nevada. While medication adherence exceeded 80% for all of SCAN’s members, there was still a difference between races. About 86% of the company’s White members took cholesterol medications as prescribed, compared to 83% of Black members and 81% of Hispanic members, according to an essay from the company published in Harvard Business Review.

A year after launching the initiative, SCAN Health brought cholesterol medication adherence up to 87.4% for Black members, 86.6% for Hispanic members and 89.6% for White members. Similar improvements were seen in diabetes medication adherence.

SCAN officials say the company achieved the improvement in disparities by tying about 10% of its senior managers’ bonuses to their success in achieving this disparity reduction.

The company chose this course of action “to make it real,” SCAN CEO Sachin Jain said. “It’s not real until you make it real for people. Otherwise, it’s kind of like ‘Oh, yeah, it’d be great if we did this.’ And we wanted to send a strong signal to our organization that this was not something that was nice to have. This is a must do.”