ACA Navigators in Illinois: An Analysis of Training Efficacy

Introduction: The Affordable Care Act (ACA) created a new workforce of healthcare coverage Navigators.  Illinois has developed a robust in-person curriculum to supplement Federal online training that equips this group with knowledge to assist individuals that have historically had barriers to coverage.  This analysis aimed to explore the impact of this program on workforce preparedness and identify any factors that are predictive of assessment & outreach performance.

 Methods: The efficacy of training is evaluated using a pre- and posttest developed by a diverse team.  Preliminary analyses demonstrate a mean change of 19.82 percentage points in the test scores suggesting that the training was responsible for moving participants’ scores from below an objective, pre-determined passing threshold to well above it.  Further, we explore sociodemographic data that was collected about the trainees and are able to identify important subgroups along which we found differential impacts of the training curriculum on learning.  We tested for these differential impacts using standard multivariate regression techniques.

 Implications: An overarching hope for the Navigator program is that they will play an important role in eliminating various disparities in healthcare coverage. A first step in meeting this goal is designing and delivering a training curriculum that facilitates the rapid mastery of complex and potentially unfamiliar material.  To our knowledge, this is the first paper to document a successful example of a Navigator training model.  We believe that our results are instructive both for future efforts in Navigator and health promotion workforce training and highlight core domains that may benefit from additional education.