Welcome everyone to the Becker's Healthcare podcast series. I'm Mariah Muhammad, writer and moderator with Becker's Healthcare. And I'm thrilled to have with me today, Pleasant Radford junior, health equity officer at UCare. Pleasant, welcome to the podcast. We're very excited to have you join us today. To get us started, would you mind please introducing yourself and telling us a bit about your background? Absolutely. My name is Pleasant Raffer junior, and I am the health equity officer at UCare. I've been at UCare for over 4 years now in this capacity, and and my job is to find ways to advance health equity for the more than 600,000 members that we serve in the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Outside of of work, I I live in Minneapolis with my wife and and 2 children and love spending time outdoors, cooking, biking, watching movies, all that fun stuff when I have the opportunity to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you so much for giving us that background. So health equity is obviously a big trend, and just a focal point for a lot of health care organizations. What are some of the biggest trends and headwinds you're following right now, that will lead you into the new year? Absolutely. The the first thing that comes to mind is trust. The American people have been very frustrated with the current state of the health care industry, and I think it has reached an apex with the the untimely death of the former UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. It's just a reminder that changes are urgently needed to reform systemic practices and restore trust and improve health overall. And and that's gonna require a lot of collaboration and a lot of policy change to make sure that we are really reforming the the current state of our health care industry. Medicaid, that continues to be a a trend that I'm I'm following, especially as we look at the the new administration that will start on January 20th. There have been discussions to slash Medicaid, and and that has a a deep impact at a federal level, but also at a state level as many states use those federal dollars for their their populations, their their Medicaid populations, and Medicare. And and so if state budgets are are smaller, then this will force health officials and state leaders to make difficult decisions related to their their residents' health care, and it will unfortunately put those vulnerable populations at a higher risk of of vulnerability. And so that's another trend that I'm following. AI, artificial intelligence, continues to transform health care delivery and experience. And as I said before, if budgets are cut at a state level, then many of these states may start or continue to use AI to automate their processes. And and that could potentially perpetuate or exacerbate some of these health care disparities that we continue to work on. And it can lead to, it could lead to to to even more more problems, administrative problems, poor health, and and more dissatisfaction with the the health care industry. And finally, aging. As we know, the country's aging population continues to grow. And last stat that I read recently shared that 30% of the $600,000,000,000 spent on Medicaid is allocated to long term services and support. And so once again, if we see smaller funds being allocated at a federal level and it trickles down to the state level, then the home care industry will will be disproportionately impacted. And the direct care workers that provide the care for our our disabled population or elderly population, they they will also be impacted as well. Yeah. Definitely. I I definitely hope that the Medicare, Medicaid, everything does not get cut at all for any of the 50 states, especially when we discuss the elderly and aging population, and obviously what they need to survive. How are you thinking about growth for the future? Are there any programs or initiatives that you're, kind of focused on growing in your organization? Absolutely. For me, personally, we continue to find ways to deepen our engagement within our community. It's so important to to understand what are the the issues that continue to challenge our members and and more importantly, how can we work together? How can we foster meaningful interactions? How can we continue to solicit that feedback to cocreate products and initiatives? As I said before, trust continues to be a a a sore point within the health care industry. And one way to to to change that is to continue to engage with our with our our members, to understand what are those sore points and how can we change them together and how can we evaluate progress and and work together. So customer community engagement, retention, and satisfaction are are some of the areas that I'm focused on related to growth. Thank you for sharing those. Is is there a project or initiative from, this year or maybe the previous year that yielded the best results for you? Absolutely. We continue to strengthen the data collection around sexual orientation and gender identity. This has been a multiyear effort that began in 2020 one, I wanna say, when we reached out to community, the LGBTQIA plus community, to understand how can we make sure that we collect the data that you want us to so that you're seen? And so through that collaboration, we were able to create 4 basic questions related to gender identity, pronouns, sexual orientation, and and sex at birth. And we've added those questions into our health risk assessment forms. And as of now, we've collected more than 53,000 responses from our members. It's small compared to the more than 600,000 members that we serve, but it's a step in the right direction. And and we're excited about that because it's we're now able to operationalize that data to improve operations. For example, we can now work with marketing to to tailor our marketing communications that reflect what's important to the LGBTQIA plus population. We wanna make sure we're using the right pronouns, that we're using images that reflect who they are and their health needs. We can work more with the the quality department to design, interventions and initiatives that that meet the needs of of our population. We can continue to work with customer service, for example, or our provider network to understand, do we have the providers that are, that are from the community, in the community to meet the needs of our of our population. And so we're we're excited. We're excited that we have what we have. We'll continue to to gather more data in 2025. And, also, we wanna make sure that our our staff are trained on how to use the data, how to work with our members by using the correct, pronouns and addressing them. So we're we're super excited about that. Yeah. Those are definitely, things that I think, also sound exciting to me. It sounds like a great step forward into the right direction. So thank you so much for sharing all of those thoughts, Pleasant. This has definitely been an informative discussion. So, again, I wanna thank you so much for coming on Becker's HealthCare, and I look forward to connecting with you again soon. Thank you so much. Have a great day.