MC+ Enrollment

St. Louis City/County
Area Resources for Community and Human Services

 

Core Result: Children and Families Healthy
Benchmark: Uninsured Children

 

February 2002

Objectives:
Reduce the number of uninsured children in the St. Louis Region by enrolling 20,000 children in the St. Louis area in the MC+ Program over the three-year period, from December 1998 to December 2001.

Strategies:
The Outreach and Enrollment Coalition, a community-wide partnership of over 200 agencies, was formed to develop specific tasks and approaches for implementation within schools to enroll children in the MC+ Program. Prescribed contact protocols were used when approaching potential enrollees, Parent Liaisons were trained to employ recruitment methods that were prescribed by the Coalition’s outreach work group.

The school nurse and social worker partnered with Caring Communities health liaisons in each school to provide one on one contact and assistance to parents of identified uninsured children. Children were identified through the free and reduced lunch program and each parent was surveyed by using the MC+ Enrollment Encounter Form. ARCHS Data staff collected data on the number of children enrolled through this process.

The students in 109 schools were targeted, with an emphasis on the 34,877 that were eligible for free and reduced lunch and who may also have been eligible for MC+. Forty-eight schools had the services of Parent Liaisons. Of the 7,000 surveys that were sent to parents, 1,542 were returned in the 2000 – 2001 school year.

Results:
There have been 26,415 children enrolled in MC+ since 1999, thus exceeding our target for the region.

Funding:
The outreach efforts were funded through a three year Robert Wood Johnson Grant, through the leveraging of support from Coalition member organizations and the St. Louis City Public Schools.

Noteworthy:
The Health Committee worked in collaboration with the Division of Family Services to develop a Reinstatement Plan for families that lost their Medicaid/MC+ as a result of Welfare Reform changes. The St. Louis City program had the highest reinstatement rate in the state at 29%. The state average was 23.3%. The Virginia Health Care Foundation recognized the St. Louis Outreach and Enrollment Effort as a “Best Practice Model”.