01/31/12 – Improving Enrollment Assistance: Closing the Information Gap
by Phillip ChungAssistant Director for Research, Evaluation & Strategic Learning
Increasingly, community-based organizations (CBOs) are playing a key role in reaching out to and enrolling low-income children and families into public health insurance programs. In this often unheralded role, CBOs consistently must navigate myriad steps – from eligibility assessment to application submission to application follow-up – to ensure that client assistance truly equates to health insurance enrollment.
A primary challenge facing many CBOs is the absence of a systematic and ongoing data exchange between a state's enrollment system and CBOs themselves. Indeed, while many current data systems typically collect enrollment information from CBOs, they do not systematically send enrollment information back to CBOs. Absent such a data feedback loop, enrollment assistance can become a more onerous, time- and resource-consuming process.
Today, The Colorado Trust released a new brief describing the benefits, challenges and implications of implementing such an enrollment data exchange between the state and CBOs via the creation of the Client Assistance Tool (CAT). Developed by researchers at the University of Colorado Denver in collaboration with CBOs, outreach and enrollment workers, county enrollment technicians and state partners, the CAT was intended to create a systematic process for feeding client-level data back to CBOs in order to track and ultimately facilitate more efficient enrollment assistance. From 2009 to 2011, the CAT was piloted by a diverse cohort of Colorado CBOs funded by The Colorado Trust. This brief offers a robust discussion of a unique tool that has the potential to improve the ability of CBOs to provide enrollment assistance while reducing existing burdens on state or county enrollment systems.
The CAT or the concept of systematic data exchange is certainly not a panacea to ensuring that assistance equals enrollment. Yet, if we are to improve the current system of public health insurance enrollment, this is a neglected but necessary issue that should be addressed more deliberately by policymakers, practitioners, advocates and consumers alike.
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