This paper provides recommendations to the California Health Benefit Exchange Board (HBEX) as it proceeds with the implementation of the SHOP program for small employers. These recommendations are aimed at ensuring that families covered through SHOP have access to and understand the best affordable care available for children. As a participant of the CA HBEX Board’s Stakeholder SHOP Work Group, The Children’s Partnership sees the SHOP as a critical piece of the children’s coverage matrix and has identified key issues around incorporating the SHOP Program into the IT system design. Further, SHOP is critical to ensuring that all possible avenues of providing health coverage for children are maximized.
This brief provides an overview of the challenges faced by California’s children and their families in obtaining necessary dental care and outlines a workforce innovation designed to bridge the supply gap between existing providers and California’s most vulnerable children. This brief also provides a proposal for action, laying out a practical solution to help California’s state and community leaders ensure children get the dental care they need and to make real the promise of health care reform.
The Children’s Partnership has developed a guide to maximize HIT’s ability to engage child and parent consumers in their own health by improving access to and use of their electronic health information. When designed with children and parents in mind, HIT can connect, inform, empower, and protect—four guide posts to effective engagement of this critical consumer segment.
Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), millions of uninsured adults and children will gain eligibility for Medicaid or health coverage through new health insurance Exchanges beginning in 2014. The law calls upon states to develop simple and streamlined processes for establishing, verifying and updating eligibility for Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and federal subsidies for Exchange coverage.
This issue brief, published in partnership with the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, examines how states can employ “express lane” principles in designing systems that use existing data held by other government agencies to help identify individuals who may be eligible for Medicaid, CHIP or subsidies for other coverage and enroll them or renew their coverage, as appropriate, under the health reform law. To do this, states will need to create linkages between the health subsidy programs and public programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and with databases held by federal agencies such as the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and the Internal Revenue Service.
This Framework lays out, step by step, how eligibility, enrollment, and retention should work for consumers so that California can meet the expectations of the Affordable Care Act. While developed for California, this Framework can be used in any state to help stakeholders focus on the elements that matter most for consumers. It is designed to be a practical resource for decision-makers as they work to achieve our shared goal: a simple, efficient door into health care in California that works well for its consumers.
California is poised to make great progress, and has an opportunity to leverage the tremendous potential of information technology to improve health and wellness outcomes for vulnerable populations, particularly children and youth living in foster care. Recent technology and policy developments have created an environment in which it is possible to transform the delivery of care by linking systems, programs, and providers, allowing decision-makers efficient access to the information necessary to provide comprehensive care to the whole child. Building on two previous reports, this issue brief summarizes the potential for electronic information exchange to enhance care coordination and improve outcomes, highlights current efforts at the state and local level to achieve these results, and raises a few policy issues that, if resolved, would facilitate movement toward the goal of appropriate information exchange between programs and providers to serve vulnerable youth.
This issue brief examines how mobile technology can be used to advance coverage goals. The report focuses especially on the capacity of mobile technology to reach and expand health coverage among traditionally underserved communities, who have less broadband access to the Internet at home. It discusses the potential of mobile devices to function as outreach tools and as a new means of applying for and renewing coverage, as well as submitting forms, receiving reminders, and paying premiums. The brief also highlights key challenges to maximizing the potential of mobile technology in this sphere and policy steps that could help to address them.
The success of the Affordable Care Act in achieving near-universal health coverage will depend on the effectiveness of the enrollment and renewal processes that states put in place. The law establishes the expectation that systems should enroll individuals with the minimum possible burden and handle transitions seamlessly.
This brief, published in partnership with the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, explains the key enrollment-related provisions of the health reform law, discusses the elements of an enrollment system that would comply with the law’s requirements, and offers strategies — and examples — of how to achieve such a system.
With a quickly approaching 2014 deadline, states must begin working together with federal agencies and stakeholders to put critical policies and systems in place. As states address the immediate challenge of designing and building an Exchange, coordination with Medicaid and CHIP at all points in the enrollment process—from application at the front-end, to data retrieval and verification at the back end—is a fundamental organizing principle.
Empowering Parents Through Technology
Computers and broadband are becoming essential tools to help parents engage in their children’s education which can improve their academic achievement and lives. This issue brief addresses ways to ensure more parents and caregivers have access to technology tools and the skills to use them effectively. It discusses the connections between schools and families, how technology reinforces existing connections and constructs new ones and how this benefits children, especially those who are underserved by the existing education system. Finally, this issue brief outlines an Empowering Parents Through Technology Action Plan that serves as a roadmap for achieving these goals.
Empowering Parents Through Technology has been used in the development and design of the Educate California programs and initiatives.
The new health reform law will require most U.S. citizens and legal residents to have health coverage by 2014. It provides new options for coverage by expanding Medicaid eligibility to more low-income people and creating a state-based system of health insurance exchanges through which individuals can purchase coverage, with federal subsidies for many.
Published in partnership with the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, this brief and accompanying explanatory chart summarize key requirements that states face under health reform to construct coordinated and consumer-friendly enrollment systems that help people understand their coverage options, and that use electronic data-matching and online processes to minimize the burdens of application and renewal, create a “no wrong door” system, ensure that people obtain the appropriate coverage, and support seamless transitions between Medicaid, CHIP, and subsidized coverage in the Exchanges.
States will need to begin planning and developing their policies, procedures, and systems right away to be prepared for 2014.