Health Equity

Health Insurance

Health literacy as a cost-control strategy: A new playbook for benefits leaders

Read Time

7 Minutes

Written by

Team Curative

Featured Insights by

Marissa Bloomer, RN, BSN, CMCN

Published

Aug 7, 2025

It’s not earth-shattering to say that health care is confusing. Most people don’t know where to go, what’s covered, or how to make sense of their benefits. That’s not their fault. It’s a symptom of a bigger issue: low health literacy.

Provider explaining medical information to patient

Health literacy is the ability to understand and use health information to make good decisions — like when to schedule a screening, how to manage a new diagnosis, or what steps to take after a doctor’s visit. And right now, nearly 9 out of 10 U.S. adults struggle with it.

For employers, that confusion has real costs. In fact, low health literacy is estimated to cost the U.S. economy as much as $236 billion each year — and much of that shows up in avoidable employer health care spending.

When employees don’t understand their coverage, they delay care or make reactive choices that lead to worse outcomes and higher expenses — from avoidable ER visits to unmanaged chronic conditions. Studies show that patients with low health literacy are significantly more likely to have repeat emergency department visits, even after accounting for age, education, and comorbidities. Benefits leaders partnering with their insurance carrier can help.

By looking at employee health data (aggregated and protected by your health insurance partner), you can spot health issues early, before they turn into serious, expensive problems. This helps implement interventions when they matter most, saving you money on health care costs while keeping your workers healthier.

Marissa Bloomer, RN, BSN, CMCN, the Vice President of Population Health at Curative, knows that health literacy needs help — she’s spent 25 years in the health care industry, with 20 of those in insurance.

At Curative, she’s seen firsthand how much a little clarity can change everything. When people understand how their coverage works and get the right support at the right time, they use more preventive care, avoid unnecessary emergencies, and stay healthier overall. That’s better for them, and it’s better for your bottom line.

Here’s her step-by-step guide for improving health literacy and improving outcomes and costs in the process.

The costly cycle of (avoidable!) health care crises

Here’s the issue: when your employees don’t have good health literacy, they make health care decisions that actually work against them; by getting reactive care, they drive up costs and have worse health outcomes too. It’s a vicious cycle: employees avoid preventive care because they’re confused about their benefits, which leads to undiagnosed conditions down the road, and those call for emergency responses. In-office productivity suffers, and costs hit your company — both from those emergencies and from the empty desks.

“There's often this really big gap between what our members actually understand and what we know as a health insurance company and as clinicians,” Bloomer said. “I've seen both on the provider side and on the health insurance side how frustration and poor outcomes can really stem from that gap."

When Bloomer saw real-world examples of this gap, she truly felt the impact.

One person — a friend of hers — hadn’t seen a PCP since childhood. When he went to a hospital for a sore, he learned he had diabetes. It turned into a 3-month stay, and cost $500,000. And with regular checkups, it would’ve been caught early and maybe even prevented.

At Curative, Bloomer realized that the traditional approach — firing off a dense benefit manual and hoping employees understand it — just doesn’t work. Even if they read it cover to cover, health literacy means way more than understanding benefits. It’s about knowing how the decisions they make will affect their health and their wallets.

Employee education is the path to sustainable health care spending.

Using data to create personalized health education

Effective health literacy isn't one-size-fits-all.

What does your employee population look like? What issues are they facing? When your health insurance partner can answer these questions with aggregated data, you can work together to tailor interventions. It’s all about getting to the root causes of poor health outcomes instead of passing on generic education.

When your insurance partner uses population-level data, you can address the health challenges that might affect different groups of employees, leading to both better engagement and better outcomes. Instead of reactive crisis management, it’s proactive prevention.

Segmented health data is your key to designing and delivering personalized education and health literacy interventions that are relevant, meaningful, and actionable.

How to organize and segment data to create targeted, effective health literacy programs

Step 1: Partner with an insurer who can help paint a true picture of your employees’ health

“We start with understanding what members are already doing in terms of who their providers are, what medications they're taking, if they’ve had recent surgeries or upcoming surgeries,” Bloomer said.

Your health insurance partner should collect this data while maintaining strict privacy protections — individual employee health information always remains confidential with the insurer.

Unlike most insurers that wait for claims to understand member health, Curative starts early. We offer a Baseline Visit in the first 120 days, giving members a strong incentive to complete it: keeping their $0 out-of-pocket benefits for in-network care.

The Baseline is a two way conversation between a member, Curative clinician and Curative Care Navigator. Employers are a clear partner to ensure completion. As the employer, you can encourage participation by promoting baseline health assessments during enrollment and ensuring employees have time to complete them.

When your insurer has comprehensive data collection capabilities, they can identify the specific health challenges your workforce faces as a population, enabling targeted rather than generic wellness approaches.

Step 2: Work with your insurer to spot patterns in the data

Your insurance partner should segment your employee population by health risks, literacy levels, and access barriers while keeping individual information private. A company like Curative can run sophisticated data analytics and provide population health insights — telling you that your workforce has higher-than-average rates of diabetes, for example, or a certain percentage of the employees show signs of unmanaged stress.

As the employer, you can provide context about operational factors — location, tech access, working hours — that could affect health program design and offerings. Your role is understanding patterns at the population level, not looking at individual employee health data.

Step 3: Tap your insurance partner to get creative and implement personalized health education

When you've identified population health needs, your health insurance provider should step in with individualized support. Curative's Care Navigator program, for example, provides one-on-one support to employees based on their specific health profiles — not just automated communications or generic content. Account managers also partner with employers to run targeted campaigns based upon the population's needs, whether that’s smoking cessation or mental health stress.

It’s also important to use multiple channels and repeat messages. Email may be better for some, while text may be better for others. A 2019 study even found that employer plans using multi-faceted health literacy interventions saw a 32% drop in hospital admissions and a nearly 11% decrease in per-capita costs.

Your role as the employer is making sure employees know that personalized support is available and creating policies that allow them to take time for consultations and appointments. Good health care policy means making support easy to access and act on — with your insurance partner handling the individual details.

Step 4: Track what’s working and keep adjusting

Your insurance partner should track individual health utilization and outcomes to measure program effectiveness, then provide you with aggregated reports showing population-level improvements and cost impacts. You can use these insights to refine your wellness policies and programs.

Share these population-level wins with company leaders and employees to maintain momentum — while always emphasizing that individual health information remains private and protected.

Data that really works

Once you’re in the swing of things, you’ll see positive changes across the board.

Better health outcomes: "When members understand their health better, they make better choices,” Bloomer said. “And that leads to overall better health.” Medication adherence goes up; chronic condition management improves; employees engage more with their preventive care. Someone with hypertension learns that they should have an at-home blood pressure cuff, Curative sends them one, and their engagement (and preventive attention) goes up.

Targeted prevention = lower costs: Curative reports high outpatient mental health utilization alongside a lower inpatient psychiatric admission rate—and the Curative Cash Card plays a big role in that. Since about one-third of behavioral health providers don’t take insurance, the Cash Card offers a zero‑out‑of‑pocket, cash-pay alternative. Combined with literacy support during the Baseline Visit, members feel confident seeking care, helping with earlier intervention, fewer crises, and lower costs. In fact, Curative’s members use mental health benefits at 150% of the national benchmark, all while keeping average costs 20% below traditional plans.

A model that scales: Curative looks deep into the data to find more strategic opportunities for outreach, predicting health trends, and showing measurable clinical outcomes. It’s scalable, so you can prevent health issues and keep costs efficient even as you hire and grow. When employees understand their health care, they show up differently — at the doctor, at work, and in their lives. You don’t have to fix the system alone. You just need a partner who helps your people feel seen, supported, and confident enough to take the next step.