Back to Annual Meeting

Back to Annual Meeting

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Brigette M. Courtot, BA and Embry M. Howell, MSPH, PhD. Health Policy Center, The Urban Institute, 2100 M Street NW, Washington, DC 20037, 202/261-5407, bcourtot@ui.urban.org

Covering Kids and Families (CKF), a four-year, $55 million initiative to increase the number of children and families with health care insurance coverage, operates through 45 statewide grantees and over 140 local community projects. Grantees and projects use three strategies to promote enrollment in SCHIP and Medicaid programs: outreach; simplification of the enrollment and renewal processes; and coordination between health care coverage programs. Since program activities launched around the same time that states were beginning to pull back from intensive SCHIP outreach, CKF funds have helped to fill a growing outreach funding gap. This report is one of a series of special analyses that have been produced throughout the CKF program evaluation; it provides new data describing CKF outreach and synthesizes findings of other evaluation reports. The CKF grantees employed diverse approaches to identify and enroll families in public health insurance programs, and CKF outreach has been sustained throughout the life of the initiative. Programs typically adopted a dual approach to reaching eligible families – broad media outreach paired with more intensive in-person efforts. The mix of outreach approaches has been consistent over time, though there have been seasonal variations in intensity. Most programs adopted targeted outreach approaches to reach special audiences and formed important outreach partnerships with other organizations in the community such as health care providers or businesses. Evaluation findings have identified some isolated examples of effective outreach efforts, usually when outreach was combined with application assistance or when certain types of media efforts were combined with targeted outreach.

Learning Objectives: