As a Military Spouse who is juggling kids, deployments, work, and life in general, keeping up with the latest news and information about our health benefits is not always on the forefront of our minds. Until, of course, we need it. Then it becomes number one, but where do we go to find that information? Generally we start with our friends, and if they have not had experience with the particular thing we are looking for we expand our search to the Internet.
I generally start with the typical Google search; it almost always ends in disaster. For example I Google “Pregnancy and TRICARE,” and I generally come up with about a thousand different forums of people asking the very same questions, and me leaving more confused than when I started.
With the ample amounts of blogs, forums, and social media pages that are out there for military spouses, it's hard to know what kind of an experience you are going to have with anything unless you know it came straight from the source.
Tri-West recognized this problem, and recently launched a new Tri-west blog called Healthy Homefront that will streamline new and relevant information regarding your TRICARE benefits. The overall goal of the website is to educate Military Spouses.
In the words of Tri-West's spokeswoman Shari Lopatin: “ We want to make sure you have the information you need, that’s relevant to you and your family. This blog is one more way to help educate you—and other military spouses—on your TRICARE benefits and other important health issues.”
By encouraging mil-bloggers to pull articles directly from the Tri-West site to their own blogs, they can ensure that the information gets to more of the individuals who need it, and those individuals will be comfortable trusting the information as it is, “straight from the horse's mouth.”
The website just launched, and I have already spent quite a bit of time on it. I have even pulled articles for my personal blog, Forget The Dog Not The Baby, which my readers love. The site itself is very user friendly, everything is labeled and easy to find, and there is even a tab where you, the beneficiary, can suggest a blog topic!
Some other things you will find on the blog are healthy living tips, TRICARE news, information on using your benefits, ways to keep you and your family healthy, and, my favorite, apps for my Mobile Phone!
The clear effort made by Tri-West to find and implement new ways to educate and inform beneficiaries is refreshing. Take some time to explore and use this new tool to your advantage, I know I will.
Kristle Helmuth is an Army veteran, wife of a wounded warrior, and blogger. Kristle's award winning blog Forget The Dog Not The Baby, started as an outlet for her to share her experiences regarding her husband’s injury in Iraq, and their journey through healing, and has since become a resource for other wounded warrior spouses.
