Cigna and the Georgetown University National Center for Cultural Competence (NCCC) recently completed a successful pilot program that offered physicians the opportunity to take a “Cultural and Linguistic Competence Health Practitioner Assessment” (CLCHPA), which is now available online to all healthcare professionals.
The CLCHPA is designed to enhance the delivery of high-quality services for diverse patient populations, and to promote cultural and linguistic competence to reduce healthcare disparities – which represent inequalities in the provision of health care and access to health care across different racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups, Cigna said in a news release today.
The CLCHPA is available online to all interested healthcare professionals on the NCCC’s website, clchpa.org.
Cigna’s Health Equity Council began working with Georgetown’s NCCC last year on a pilot with 450 doctors within the Cigna network who completed the online self-assessment. More than 80 percent of the doctors who took the assessment were at a highly skilled level of knowledge about cultural competency and health disparities, and the practical application of both, but nearly 40 percent scored low on actually promoting the health of culturally and linguistically diverse communities, Cigna said.
All doctors received a personalized report of their scores, and a listing of resources for continued professional development.
