Students go mobile to educate community about health insurance

Navigating health insurance can be confusing, especially for people obtaining coverage for the first time through the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

Students at the University of Texas Health Science Center wanted to help, so they created a mobile phone app to help educate Bexar County residents about health coverage. The SA Access app is available in English and Spanish for iOS and Android and can be downloaded free at SAAccess.com.

In partnership with the Health Collaborative, students developed the app as part of a community service learning project called Access Care Texas (ACT) Together for Health at the health science center’s Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics. The Health Collaborative, a nonprofit, provided much of the funding for the project and published the app.

“In the process of making this app, which is definitely a really cool product, we’ve also learned a lot about most effectively communicating with patients in a way that they learn more about their health,” medical student Chelsea Lehman said.

The app offers a crash course in understanding the importance of health insurance, the types of health coverage and how to use it. Users can learn how to read an insurance card and understand an explanation of benefits. A glossary offers definitions of terms such as “co-pay” and “deductible.” The app includes a list of local and national resources so users can get personalized help.

The app’s landing page features a picture of the River Walk, and the bright colors of its design were inspired by Fiesta.

“This is important because what we’re doing here is designing an app for San Antonio, and we want it to be culturally relevant,” medical student Brian Duffy said during a presentation at the annual Texas Health Literacy Conference in San Antonio last month.

Videos and narrated slideshows illustrate different insurance concepts and costs. Users also can complete a worksheet about their health care needs, which can help facilitate a meeting with an ACA navigator, medical student Roy Williams said. An embedded calculator estimates insurance costs.

The ACT Together for Health project began in fall 2013 with the launch of the ACA. The San Antonio Metropolitan Health District approached Dr. Ruth Berggren, director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics, for help with educating uninsured Bexar County residents about their new health insurance options.

Berggren and Melanie Stone, assistant director of community service learning at the center, mobilized a group of students. They teamed up with Enroll SA to educate more than 1,250 community members about the federal health insurance marketplace.

Soon it became clear that newly insured people didn’t necessarily understand how to effectively use their insurance, said Stone, who mentors the project. Last year’s project leadership team decided to create a health insurance toolkit.

They believed a smartphone app would provide an interactive way to learn about health coverage, an idea supported by research, Stone said. Data shows 10 percent of Americans depend on their smartphone as their Internet source, and those users are less likely to have health insurance than those who have other means of access.

“When we started researching it, we saw there was no other app for health insurance literacy,” Stone said. “We were trying to reach audiences that weren’t typically being reached.”

This year’s project leadership team — three medical students, a dental student and a clinical lab science student — continued the development of the app, along with a website, SAAccess.com, and a printed workbook that mirrors the app.

A student leader has conducted a preliminary analysis of data from people who were tested on their health insurance knowledge before and after using the app. The analysis shows a statistically significant improvement in the scores of the post-test compared to the pre-test, demonstrating the effectiveness of using the SA Access app, Stone said.

Now gaining popularity in health science education, community service learning is valuable for students, Stone said.

A classroom lecture about access to care “doesn’t have the same impact or feeling that it does when you are out in the community working with real people who are struggling to get their families insured,” Stone said.

The first version of the app was released in early November. A second version with critical updates will be ready before the end of the year.

Nearly 300,000 Bexar County residents are uninsured, according to the Census Bureau. Open enrollment in 2016 health insurance plans runs through Jan. 31.