Health Partners Awarded “Multicultural Health Care Distinction” Second Consecutive Time

For the second straight time, Health Partners has received the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) “Multicultural Health Care Distinction.” 

In 2011, Health Partners became the first plan in the nation to receive this recognition from NCQA, the nation’s most trusted independent source for health care quality accreditation. 

The “Multicultural Health Care Distinction” recognizes organizations that identify and address healthcare disparities having to do with race, ethnicity and language. To be considered, Health Partners had to meet a rigid set of five crucial NCQA standards and document how it effectively meets the needs of its nearly 170,000 diverse members. After reviewing this information, NCQA identified Health Partners as having 100 percent compliance across all five standards — a perfect score!

“It is an honor to be recognized again by NCQA for our multicultural outreach and efforts to reduce health care disparities in the Greater Philadelphia region,” said William S. George, president & CEO of Health Partners. “As America becomes more diverse, excellence in multicultural health care is increasingly important. Our healthcare management team works extremely hard to ensure the health care needs of all of our members are continually met.”

“Cultural competency is crucial to providing high quality health care,” said NCQA president Margaret E. O’Kane. “Organizations achieving Multicultural Health Care Distinction are leaders in closing the ethnic and racial disparities gap, and NCQA commends them for their dedication.”

To help meet its members’ needs, Health Partners trains and certifies bilingual staff members, provides members with access to a network of providers who speak 35 different languages and translates reading materials into Spanish and other languages upon request. In addition, Health Partners has initiated programs that track and analyze comprehensive data on members’ health status by race, ethnicity and language to identify disparities.