Four years ago, Kate Hoelscher joined the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota team as a learning and development consultant. A month later, she also took the reins of the Blue Cross Beyond the Yellow Ribbon (BTYR) program, which connects service members, veterans, and their families with community support, training, services, and resources. For Hoelscher, this mission is personal.
“My husband is a veteran. A company where I know I’m going to be supported as a spouse is really important,” Hoelscher says. “I have the support network here that I need for how my life is different from the typical relationship.” Then in January 2016, Blue Cross earned the designation as the first health plan in the country to be a BTYR company. Marc Baer, vice president of health services at Blue Cross, says that the BTYR program offers practical solutions for veterans and their spouses.
“We’re a company that has made a very specific commitment to helping veterans, both as an employer of them, creating opportunities for them to find work, supporting those who are employed by us, and then putting products that are really out there to help veterans into every market segment,” Baer says. Dana Erickson, vice president of care management at Blue Cross, explains that understanding the unique challenges of those in uniform is a Blue Cross priority.
“We certainly want to understand the challenges that they have, either coming back from deployment or through the health care system itself,” Erickson says. “So even ensuring that we’re hiring people back in that have had that experience, then also just interacting day-to-day from a health care perspective is really important for us as well.”