Printed materials in Spanish and Korean help speakers of those languages better understand the importance of taking their medications as prescribed. Likewise, SCAN’s bilingual pharmacists regularly contact members who don’t adhere to their prescription regimens in order to help them better understand their medications and how to take them. For example, by using Spanish-speaking Care Navigators and Spanish-language “teletalks,” SCAN successfully increased flu vaccination rates among its Spanish-speaking members by up to 10% when compared to previous flu seasons. Jain noted that SCAN has already implemented several programs that accord with the study’s findings.
“What’s more, the results also suggest that matching patients to a language concordant PCP can lead to significant cost savings, given the increased expense associated with specialist, inpatient, and ED settings,” said Dr. Sachin Jain, president and CEO of SCAN Group and one of the study’s authors. “The results of this study indicate that that there is an urgent need to provide linguistically and culturally competent care for non-English speaking communities in order to improve their overall population health,” said Dr. The results were published today in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. The study looked at non-English-speaking members enrolled in SCAN Health Plan, one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit Medicare Advantage plans. 5, 2021-How important is it for doctors to speak the same language as their patients?Ī new study shows that when doctors speak the same language as their patients, patients are more likely to visit their primary care physician (PCP) for preventive and follow-up care, likely resulting in fewer specialist visits, emergency room trips and hospitalizations. ‘Language concordance between patients and physicians may lead to lower cost and more appropriate use of healthcare resources ’ SCAN uses bilingual outreach to reduce health outcomes disparities
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