Many multicultural women still don’t get the care they need because health disparities relating to ethnicity and race are too often ignored. But now leading companies are working to tailor their benefits to fit each employee, from screening for certain cancers, diabetes and stroke to spreading the word about disease risk factors.

If you ask Tammie Cottom, she’ll tell you her employer saved her life. Like many other African Americans, Tammie has a history of diabetes in her family. “My parents and grandparents on both sides have it,” says the 48-year-old mom of two. “My father has heart issues because of diabetes, and he can no longer see or walk. We’ve had a number of calls from the hospital saying they didn’t know if he would make it through the night.”

Even so, Tammie, a vice president at Basking Ridge, NJ–based Verizon, didn’t always eat right and indulged in far too many cups of McDonald’s sweet iced tea. Still, she was taken aback last October when, at a conference for multicultural employees, Verizon’s free biometric screenings showed she was borderline diabetic. “I knew diabetes would sneak up on me, and my heart dropped, because that was one of my biggest health fears,” she says. Tammie went cold turkey on the sweet tea and Coke, and by the time she went to the doctor a week later, her blood sugar was within the normal range again. Since then, Tammie has worked to lessen her risk for diabetes by following a doctor-recommended diet and exercise plan. “I know that screening saved me from getting diabetes,” she says. “I wasn’t planning
to go for a checkup for some months, and it would probably have been too late by then.”

Get the Facts
Tammie’s diabetes was caught early because Verizon, one of this year’s Best Companies for Multicultural Women, offers its employees specifically tailored biometric screenings and workshops to take into account health disparities related to ethnicity and race. It’s an important health gap that’s too often ignored: The American Medical Association asserts that racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to get routine screenings, generally receive a lower quality of health care and have higher rates of morbidity and mortality than nonminorities. These disparities in health care exist even when access-related factors, such as patients’ insurance and socioeconomic statuses, are controlled, according to a 2003 report from the Institute of Medicine.

At issue is the fact that too many people of color don’t make use of necessary preventive and diagnostic services, with very serious consequences. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the leading causes of death for African-American women and Latinas are heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease.

African Americans are about twice as likely to have diabetes as European Americans of the same age, while Latinas have the highest rate of cervical cancer. And even though Asian-American women have the highest life expectancy of any U.S. population group, cervical cancer rates are very high in certain subgroups, especially among Vietnamese women.

Yet many companies overlook these health issues when choosing employee benefit plans or designing wellness programs. A recent survey of 1,500 benefit managers by the National Business Group on Health, a nonprofit membership organization that represents large employers on national health-care issues, found that nearly half of the managers believed ethnic health-care disparities “weren’t a problem” for their employees, even though 80 percent had never asked minority employees if their race affected their health care.  As it turns out, many multicultural employees do want their companies’ health and wellness programs to take their specific needs into consideration.

R_x for Good Health
In a recent Working Mother survey, sponsored by Abbott, multicultural women put access to stress management, nutrition, physical fitness and alternative medicine on the top of their wellness wish list—programs that would counter a lot of the illnesses that disproportionately affect women of color, like diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

It was the 2003 Institute of Medicine paper on health disparities related to race and ethnicity that prompted Audrietta Izlar, benefits manager at Verizon, to suggest that her company start collecting health-related data based on ethnicity and race from its employees so that it could better tailor health and wellness benefits. “We are a company that takes pride in the diversity of our workforce,” she says, “so it was a natural fit for us to consider health disparities when the report came out.”

Beyond ensuring that employees stay healthy, identifying gaps in health care and benefits coverage can also help increase worker productivity and save companies money: Studies show that it’s much less expensive to provide screenings and preventive care to treat chronic health conditions like heart disease and cancer than it is to treat them after they develop. To that end, says Sheri Gatto, wellness coordinator at State Farm, also one of the Best Companies for Multicultural Women, “we provide as solid a prevention model as possible. Women can now get mammograms for free, and this year, we launched our cancer-screening preventive benefit and blood-pressure awareness campaign.”

One Size Does Not Fit All
To their credit, even if corporate benefit managers don’t take race and ethnicity into account, many do work hard to ensure that all employees have a set of comprehensive health and wellness benefits. But experts say that while it’s a start, it’s just not enough. “Disparities exist, even within companies with benefits,” argues Leah Trahan, a manager at the National Business Group on Health. “The key is to tailor and to understand that the one-size-fits-all approach is not going to work best. And it’s not just how you’re structuring programs, it’s how you’re working with health plans and employees so that they understand the issues.”

Trahan says companies should start by collecting data about their employees, which is exactly what benefit managers did at State Farm. The company offered employees a small financial incentive to fill out an online medical assessment, and for some, the results were surprising. “The more information you fed it, the more information you found out about yourself,” recalls Harolyn Watts, 50, a property and claims director at State Farm. “I’m not overweight, but it did show that I need to exercise more and gave me the data to show me, ‘Okay, girl. You’re heading down the wrong path!’”

Harolyn discussed her results with her doctor and now takes Pilates on-site at State Farm’s Bloomington, IL, offices. The mother of two also took part in State Farm’s employee weight-loss challenge, which was inspired by its 2008 partnership with Dr. Ian Smith’s 50 Million Pound Challenge, an initiative to help African Americans nationwide lose weight. “I felt that the challenge spoke to me as an African-American woman,” says Harolyn. “And the online resources provided a lot of information about my community and the gaps that we have in taking care of ourselves.”

Verizon has also opted to collect employee data, and has specifically highlighted ethnicity and race as a way to help it find the best insurance providers for its employees. “We asked the insurance companies if they had data to identify gaps in care or utilization by race and, if so, if they were trying to put programs in place to close that gap,” explains Izlar. It’s a question heard most clearly by insurance companies when a major employer like Verizon asks, since large companies provide health benefits to two out of three Americans with health insurance. By asking these kinds of questions, progressive companies are in a position to change the way that health-care services are delivered.

In the end, Verizon chose Aetna as a health insurance provider because of its efforts to address racial and ethnic health disparities. In partnership with Aetna’s Breast Health initiative, Verizon identified African-American and Hispanic employees who hadn’t had mammograms at the age or frequency suggested by the American Cancer Society and sent letters to these women. As a result, “we were able to increase screening by forty-four percent,” says Izlar. Verizon is also now expanding its on-site mammography-screening program in locations with a large number of employees who are Latina or African-American women over 40.

Get the Word Out
This kind of communication is important to improving the impact of existing health and wellness programs. Cynthia Tuttle, vice president at the National Business Group on Health, says that employers should develop a communications strategy to inform employees about disease risk factors and available services that are specific to their needs from a cultural, racial and gender-specific standpoint. For example, she says, “companies need to provide health material in multiple languages, drilling deeper to improve health literacy so that employees understand and access the benefits available to them.”

One way to reach out to different employees is through a company’s affinity groups, which can help to spread infor mation about health risks and company benefits to specific employee populations. For instance, at PepsiCo, another Best Companies for Multicultural Women winner, its diversity and inclusion initiative includes groups for African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender employees, some of which offer targeted health information on their own websites. The groups invite experts to speak about related health risks and discuss how members of their ethnic group might be treated differently than members of other pop ulations by health-care providers. PepsiCo also offers employees scripts that they can use to discuss health issues with their doctors.

“We specifically talk about disparities or the differences in conditions and how people are treated,” explains Ellen Exum, PepsiCo’s program director of wellness and prevention, in an issue brief from the National Business Group on Health. “During the ‘lunch and learns’ we call it disparities, but as an initiative we call it diversity and inclusion, because I think for us it means it is more inclusive.”

And ultimately, that’s exactly why more leading companies are considering potential cultural and racial disparities when crafting health and wellness programs. It enables them to provide benefits that are more inclusive and take into account the cultural differences that might prevent some employees from utilizing them. By helping employees learn more about their own health, employers can empower more multicultural women to take care of themselves and have productive conversations with their doctors.

For Verizon’s Tammie Cottom, it’s a lesson learned—and much appreciated. “Our population is more susceptible to certain illnesses, like high blood pressure, cancers and diabetes,” says Tammie. “We should have this kind of health screening for that very reason—because our needs are different. In my case, it had a very real impact.”

Eat This
Swipe these staples from your coworkers’ native cuisines for extra health benefits.

Asian Sensation
Think sushi. Salmon, yellowtail and other fatty fish are a good source of omega-3 fatty acids, which benefit cardiovascular, brain and skin health.

Soul Food
A side of collard greens offers you vitamins a, b6 and c, plus manganese, iron, calcium, folic acid, fiber and small amounts of omega-3. And their phytonutrients may help prevent ovarian and breast cancers.

Latin Spice
Add zip to meals with chili peppers like cayenne and jalapeño, which contain capsaicin, a substance known for cardiovascular and anti-inflammatory benefits. Cayenne is also high in vitamin a and contains b6, c, e, riboflavin, potassium and manganese.