Hello, everybody. My name is Hannah Vedava, and I'm here with my colleague Jonathan Wrigley to discuss our research, which is exploring digital solutions to health insurance literacy disparities. I'd like to start out just kind of by talking about what health insurance literacy is and what we were aiming to do with our research. If you're familiar with the Affordable Care Act that was passed in 2010, that expanded access among Americans to health insurance but did not necessarily increase health insurance literacy or the understanding of health insurance terms, costs, and generally how the system works. In fact, by the U.S. Census, they found that 88% of United States adults can't actually calculate their health insurance costs, which is kind of a big gap. We did find during our literature review that there were specific demographics, especially young males, that struggled to understand costs and insurance terminology. In order to combat this, we developed a website called InsureEasy to help users generally compare plans, understand their coverage, and boost health insurance literacy generally, leading to better outcomes and a more informed public on the other side. I'll let Jon tell you a little bit more about the methods and materials. All right. So, yeah, as Hannah said, I'm going to talk about our methods and materials used as well as our results. So, to start, our website, InsureEasy.org, was developed over the span of three months with the use of Wix.com, Python, and JavaScript. The hallmark Browse Plans tool, which allows users to browse and devise health insurance plans to suit their needs, used data that was collected using Google's Gemini AI and ChatGPT 3.5, so AI kind of plays a big role in our project. Additional pages were developed, including an interactive quiz, a terminology page, and a resource page that was curated by the student team. Following the website development, we had an IRB approval that was obtained to study the website efficacy on the Rocky Vista University student, faculty, and family member population. These participants were recruited via physical and digital flyers displaying a QR code with access to pre-surveys assessing their health insurance comfortability and the website. After participants had some time to peruse the website at their leisure, they were asked to complete a post-survey assessing the helpfulness of the tools and provide general overall feedback. So moving on to results, we can see that 48% of our participants completed both the pre- and post-surveys. Additionally, 58% of participants indicated a recent plan change to their health insurance within the previous two years. For the pre-survey, listed below is the demographic information for our 50 pre-survey participants, which consisted of a majority of students at 60%. 90% of those participants did have health insurance. When assessing pre-survey comfort level with health insurance, 70% rated their comfortability as either neutral, uncomfortable, or very uncomfortable, while only 30% rated their comfort level as comfortable or very comfortable. As you see on the post-survey side, listed below are the demographics for our 24 post-survey participants, again, with a majority of students at 46%. 88% of those post-survey participants stated that they have health insurance. Overall, 67 participants rated the use of the website positively, rating that they received some helpful knowledge or received significant helpful knowledge. And as demonstrated by our bar chart there in the middle, you can see the breakdown of the percentages of participants that rated the use of our Browse Plans tool, Learn About Insurance tool, and our resource page as either helpful, very helpful, or if it left them feeling confused or very confused. What we can see is that our Learn About Insurance tool was rated the most positively with 88% of participants rating it helpful or very helpful, followed by the resources page with 80% of participants rating it helpful or very helpful, and then the Browse Plans tool with 58% rating it helpful or very helpful. And I'll pass it back to Hannah to finish this out. Sure thing. So just a couple of data points to highlight that we found particularly interesting. It's kind of unsurprising based on our previous research that 70% of participants were uncomfortable with health insurance terms from the pre-survey, but it is encouraging that 67% of users did find some benefit from the website validating the potential utility of these digital tools. Of particular note, 80% of students surveyed felt uncomfortable with health insurance literacy, which also tracks that younger individuals may lack experience with health insurance and may be uncomfortable. 92% of students with the student Aetna plan were uncomfortable with that, which is also explained because it's a higher deductible plan than the lower deductible cost-shared Cigna plan that the employees can benefit from. So that might explain that statistic as well. Generally, to conclude from here, we really want to expand the content of the website, especially the Browse Plans page with adding Medicare and Medicaid information for both Colorado and Utah, as well as vision and dental insurance information. We want to tighten up the user interface a little bit, kind of fix some formatting things and make things more user-friendly, and then ultimately create a mobile app to fill a gap that we noticed that there is no mobile app out there that actually does cross-compare insurances across companies and provide free health insurance literacy to the public. So we definitely want to convert InsureEasy into a mobile app at some point in the future. If you'd like to check out our website, it is linked on the bottom right-hand QR code, and there is a screenshot in Figure 2 in the middle just to kind of give you an idea of the user interface, but the full website is available with that QR code. Just want to thank you all for your attention this evening, and we'd be happy to field any questions in the Q&A at the conference or by email prior to that. Thank you so much and have a good evening.

health insurance literacy

digital solutions

InsureEasy.org

AI technologies

mobile app development