JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Sept. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida is sending its nearly quarter million BlueOptions members Personal Health Reports so they can better plan their families’ health-related activities. Working within federal privacy guidelines, the reports detail a family’s prior year’s health activities in their BlueOptions health plan, offer preventive health tips for each family member, and deliver recent health news, based on the family’s demographics.
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The goal, according to John Kaegi, Group Vice President for Marketing, BCBSF, is to help BlueOptions members better understand how they use health care and help them organize their health care expenses, in a time when people are paying more out of pocket to encourage more intelligent health consumerism.
“It’s a lot like the quarterly reports a credit card company might send a customer,” Kaegi said. “In the health version, though, we organize for our BlueOptions members a record of their family’s health care activities for each family member with physicians, pharmacies, and hospitals, by date, with a description of the service, the amount the provider billed and what the member actually pays. The idea is to help a family plan for their health care needs, just the way a person getting that credit card analysis might plan a budget.” Each family member is given reminders about good preventive care, tailored to gender and age, and a health care news brief, also aimed at the individual.
Personal privacy issues were closely analyzed, Kaegi said, and any family member who requested that his or her information be withheld under HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act*) guidelines would not be included.
BlueOptions, growing at a rate of 20,000 members per month, is the fastest growing segment of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida business. It is a family of “consumer-driven” health plans that offer individual purchasers and employers great flexibility in creating benefits programs. The BCBSF vision is to develop BlueOptions plans and the NetworkBlue physician and hospital network on a new software, hardware and human services platform to deliver maximum quality, service and affordability by today’s high standards.
“We have been in the business of providing health care coverage for more than 60 years,” Kaegi said, “so we have knowledge of our business that allows for tremendous creativity in product design and service concept. With all the technological advances available today, in combination with the opportunity to educate a consumer now eager to learn, this is exactly the right time to create a new platform, and plan for unprecedented growth. The Personal Health Report is an early step in what we’ll be doing for our BlueOptions members.”
* For consumer information about HIPAA guidelines, please use this link:
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CONTACT: Valerie Rubin, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida,+1-904-905-5315, or mobile, +1-904-535-2886