Blue Cross Blue Shield—A Part of the Community

Blue Cross Blue Shield—A Part of the Community

Oldest Health Benefit Provider Wants to Make Health Care Better

75 years ago, Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) was set up to make sure that teachers in Texas and lumber and mining workers in the Pacific Northwest could get medical care. BCBS is the oldest and biggest health insurance company in the US. It now helps more than 94 million Americans pay for care.

The BCBS Association is the trade group for the 38 independently owned local BCBS health benefit groups that serve 1 in 3 Americans. They have plans in all 50 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico. BCBS uses its power to make a name for itself on a national level. It runs several community activities that focus on education, research, and working together. The Foundation on Health Care and the Academy for Health Care Management are two programs that help with research and professional development. The National Labor Organization (NLO) helps workers get jobs, and the PBS show Second Opinion is an educational campaign about performance-enhancing substances called Healthy Competition.

BCBS Foundation for Health Care

The BCBS Foundation on Health Care is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit group that helps many organizations around the country work together on health service research. The Foundation helps government organizations, colleges and universities, and health insurance work together. It funds the Health Services Research Advisory Council (HSRAC), which is made up of well-known health care specialists from across the country, and the Health Services Research Alliance (HSRA), which has members from 25 states.

The HSRAC helps figure out the most important parts of multi-plan health services research and gives advice on how to do it. It also gives advice on how changes in the availability and delivery of health care might affect people, groups, and communities, and it helps with the funding and planning of possible studies.

The BCBS Foundation helps organizations in the HSRA work together to do important research that are based on evidence and the population. The Foundation is committed to building crucial relationships between different organizations, increasing financing opportunities, and making its presence felt more strongly in the health insurance and health care sector. The association spreads the word about health care conferences, encourages data-driven research on medical concerns, and seeks to make services better and get them to people faster.

Academy for Managing Health Care

The BCBS Association, the American Association of Health Plans, and the Health Insurance Association of America (AAHP-HIAA) all worked together to create the academy. Its goal is to give professionals who want to learn more about the problems, priorities, and procedures involved in managed care operations the chance to do so online. Participants can use new management ideas in real-life settings and learn through quick feedback and evaluation.

The course materials, which are updated on a regular basis, give students information, principles, and problems that help them build on what they already know and learn more about advanced ideas and methods in the healthcare field. Students can become a Professional, Academy of Healthcare Management (PAHM), or Fellow, Academy of Healthcare Management (FAHM) after finishing their coursework and collecting Continuing Education credits.

The National Labor Office

BCBS started the NLO more than forty years ago, and they still give money to it today. The NLO is the labor outreach arm, and its main goals are to keep union members up to date on health care issues, improve relationships to organized labor, and offer good programs and services to the more than 20 million union members and their families.

NLO's main job is to connect BCBS with labor. It does this by providing instructional materials, building ties between different groups, and giving out crucial information. The NLO talks about new healthcare goods, pending laws, growing trends, managed care, and bargaining techniques.

In addition to talking to unions, the NLO helps union leaders and BCBS top officers share information and talk about problems. They work together to solve issues that are unique to each union, such as making the workplace healthier, defining healthcare that is based on value, and providing analysis, reporting, and design for health plans.

The NLO talks to unions through its main office, newsletters, the web, and informational meetings.

Competition that is good for you

BCBS started the Healthy Competition program because more and more professional and amateur athletes were using performance-enhancing drugs. Healthy Competition tells athletes to protect their health and the integrity of their sport by not using drugs while they compete.

The program gives you information about drugs, sports, and staying healthy. It gives descriptions of the three forms of performance-enhancing drugs: stimulants, blood doping chemicals, and anabolic steroids. Healthy Competition helps with research and teaching and raises public awareness through a number of programs.

PBS Second Opinion

BCBS is the sponsor of the 2005–2006 season of Second Opinion, a PBS show that brings together different medical professionals to talk about real medical issues. The program tries to help people understand more about medical difficulties, options, and procedures that come up in our complicated and always changing society.

In the US, BCBS is the biggest provider of health benefits. It has grown a lot since it started 75 years ago. However, it still focuses on servicing individual groups, much like it did when it first started giving benefits to teachers, lumbermen, and miners. This is because it is committed to improving professional and public education.

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