United Way of Madison County, Anderson, Indiana proudly supports reducing the number of uninsured families in Madison County through its work with the Covering Kids and Families local coalition.  The Covering Kids and Families coalition of Madison County strives to bring together partners across a spectrum of health, education and social services to focus on conducting outreach, coordinating enrollment, increasing capacity and increasing retention among Madison County residents.

One afternoon in January we were able to pull together an Enrollment Center Training Session for enrollment center specialists from the five enrollment centers in Madison County. We had staff from the three hospitals, the Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) and the major mental health center within Madison County. The training session provided a refresher course on Indiana CHIP and SCHIP, called Hoosier Healthwise, and conducted by the local director of the Madison County Department of Family Resources. Enrollment specialists were able to follow-up with questions, concerns and comments, and the local director had a chance to get to know staff at local enrollment centers.

Following the refresher course, we had staff from the state CHIP administrators discuss the new hybrid system that is slowly being introduced across the state. The hybrid system will be replacing what was called the modernized system, implemented in 2007. The new hybrid system will take the best parts of the traditional enrollment process and combine it with many of the improvements introduced from modernized system; while removing some of the programs and aspects that failed to achieve their desired goals. The hybrid system has been well received and successful and will be introduced in February in Madison County. Afterwards, we followed up with staff that attended and discussed options for future training sessions, including traditional Medicaid, Medicare Part D, and the Healthy Indiana Plan.

Besides capacity building, the coalition has focused on numerous other key concepts since its inception in the spring of 2009. The coalition has worked to build a smart meeting structure to be efficient while providing important news and information, networking and partnership-building between many competing organizations. The coalition has worked to build partnerships with organizations that will promote insurance coverage, advocate for their clients and submit referrals for uninsured clients. We have also created an online presence via our United Way page, including a referral form for providers to bookmark and for clients to fill out. We have also worked hard to bring Text4Baby into the county, a text-based health information distribution for pregnant women and we promote the FamilyWize Prescription Discount Card for families that don’t qualify for available plans.