Meeting the Needs of Multi-Cultural, At-Risk Populations

Medicaid Enrollment Outreach, Assistance, and Customer Service Recovery for the District of Columbia Department of Health


The Client’s Challenge

To meet the requirements of new Federal legislation, our client needed to determine the number of children, parents, and guardians eligible for expanded Medicaid program benefits.  This effort also required a district-wide marketing campaign to enroll 13,000 new recipients and re-enroll recipients who had dropped out of the program because of poor customer service.

Meeting the Challenge

HAI identified the demographic characteristics of the Medicaid-eligible target population, conducted focus groups on barriers and issues relating to enrollment, and developed a media campaign to reach populations in specific ethnic and racial communities.  More than 200 special events were designed and conducted.  In addition to our outreach efforts, HAI established a call center to resolve customer service issues and provide assistance to Medicaid recipients and created a clearinghouse to distribute promotional materials in English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Amharic.  These initiatives not only resulted in a 20% increase in Medicaid enrollments over prior year levels, but the program was so successful that our approach is used as a national model in the National Institutes of Health “Best Practices” review of effective outreach programs.

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