A word with Curtis Barnett, President and Chief Executive Officer

New year. New challenges. New opportunities.

 

Welcome 2025! I look forward to the start of a new calendar year. It’s an opportunity to look back briefly and look forward vigorously. And while we may all be starting a new year, at Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield, we’re committed to the same mission: to improve the health, the financial security, and the peace of mind of the members and communities we serve.

One of the most important ways we work to achieve our mission is to listen to you, our members – every chance we get – to turn your feedback into action because we believe, as a member, you provide great direction on what to do, when and where to apply change, and why it matters most to you.

We offer opportunities for our members to provide us with much needed feedback through ongoing surveys during each year to discover how to serve you better. Here are just some of the actionable changes we’ve made recently:

• In addition to the friendly voice on the other end of the phone addressing your call through our member advocates, many of you have told us that you like to interact with us digitally, so we’ve added a chat bot and live chat within Blueprint Portal to make sure all lines of communication are open and ready when you need us. You told us communicating how you want is a critical part of the healthcare experience.
• We’ve also redesigned our onboarding process to provide digital access and highlights so that new members can access resources early and often. We want the personalized benefits and the value you expect to be at your fingertips anytime and anyplace you need us.
• We understand that health insurance can be complex with a language all its own. Our teams have doubled down on trying to make our processes more transparent and the language we use much clearer. Through our Understanding Health Insurance site, you have access to healthcare terminology in what we hope are more understandable words and phrases.
• Finally, once we created better communications, we recognized that we needed to do a better job helping you understand how your medical claims are being processed. Our digital experience teams worked hard in 2024 to ensure that you have more details inside the Blueprint Portal within a few easy clicks. Now you can see full claims processing details that share the breakdown of services provided, service dates, and more even before your Explanation of Benefits (EOB) may be fully available.

In 2024, we saw more downloads of our Blueprint Portal app and online engagement than ever before. We deployed better messaging across more communications channels and have created a new message center just for our online portal users that will launch soon.

We’re listening. Every post-call survey, member feedback survey and every email is carefully reviewed by our teammates to champion the causes that are important to you, our members, and define how we build a better healthcare experience for all. Three out of every four members tell us that we’re easy to do business with, and that’s in great part due to the ongoing feedback we get from you. But we want to do even better. We’re committed to listening and serving you.

In the moments that matter, when we take good care, we deliver on our promise to improve the health of the members we serve. We’re trying to simplify your experiences, asking often and in a variety of ways how we can improve, and using emerging technologies, whenever appropriate, to make those changes.

But we won’t lose sight of the fact that our strengths, as a health plan, are rooted in the human side of healthcare. It’s what drives and differentiates us. It’s what gives us our purpose, our energy.

We realize we’re often one of the first calls you make when receiving the news of a critical illness or catastrophic accident.  When we get that call, our job is to make sure you get the right care, at the right place, at the right time and that you can afford the care you need.

We take that responsibility seriously.