Coalition to take over Healthy Kids program

The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors has voted to transfer
management of the Healthy Kids Sonoma County program from the
Department of Public Health Services (DHS) to the Redwood Community
Health Coalition (RCHC).
The move is expected to streamline the process of enrolling
uninsured children into public health programs by taking advantage
of RCHC medical records software and its team of “certified
application assistors.” 
“It made sense for multiple reasons,” said Mary Maddux-Gonzalez,
director of the Sonoma County public health division. “RCHC
provides the majority of care to low income children in Sonoma
County, and possesses an electronic Web-based application that
allows them to administer the program more efficiently.” 
The county expects to save upwards of $150,00 annually once the
transition is complete.
The Sonoma County Healthy Kids collaborative was formed in 2004
to help provide health insurance coverage to uninsured children of
low-income families in the county.
After four years of operation, enrollment of children in public
health insurance programs has grown by 8,967. 
Despite the increased enrollment, a survey by the California
Healthcare Foundation indicates that there are still as many as
10,000 uninsured children in the county. Approximately 60 percent
of those children qualify for one of the state funded programs.
Although the number of children enrolling in the program
continues to grow, several sources of funding will run out at the
end of 2010 when the California Endowment and the Blue Shield
Foundation will no longer fund health insurance premiums for
low-income children, representing an annual loss of $250,000.
According to the DHS “2010 Realignment Plan” presented to the
Board of Supervisors at the Nov. 10 meeting, the majority of
Healthy Kids  funding comes from the First 5 program, which has
contributed $1.7 million through 2009, and has committed to
continued assistance for another five years. 
The DHS has acted as the interim administrative organization
since June 2005, and in November of that year, the Board approved a
five-year business plan for the Sonoma County Children’s Health
Initiative, the overarching program for Healthy Kids. 
The Sonoma Healthy Kids Steering Committee has developed a plan
to continue operations beyond its initial five year period, and the
county will remain involved through the committee, under the
supervision of Maddux-Gonzalez.
“This is something the steering committee has been working on
for several years,” Maddux-Gonzalez said. “It made sense for the
county. RCHC made the most sense.”
The RCHC is a network of 15 community health centers and clinics
in Sonoma, Marin, Napa, and Yolo counties that serves between
100,000 to 300,000 patients annually, according to Pedro Toledo,
Healthy Kids Enrollment Coordinator for RCHC.
Twenty percent of Sonoma County kids come to its clinics each
year, and the system now has 28 trained enrollment workers on
staff. 
“It’s what we’ve been doing,” Toledo said. “We’ve invested
millions of dollars in training enrollment workers so they can
effectively get people into the program.” 
Additionally, RCHC has reached agreement with One-E-App, an
electronic medical records system that screens and enrolls patients
in a range of health, social service and other programs. The system
also allows patients to receive preliminary eligibility
determinations.
“Health center staff doing the training and coordination should
make it easier to deliver, since we’ve eliminated a layer of
bureaucracy,” Toledo said. “We’re trying to streamline as much as
possible.”
Toledo added that the goal of the RCHC is to create a medical
home, and to help families find health insurance to gain access to
services they don’t have. 
Health officials remain hopeful that national health care reform
will allow everyone to have access to timely, affordable care in
the near future. Until such time, they will continue to reach out
to the uninsured with whatever means are available. 
“We need national health care reform, but even when we get it,
we’ll need people to help people enroll,” Toledo said. “People wait
until they are sick too enroll, and we want to stop that.”
Maddux-Gonzalez echoed that sentiment. 
“We need a long-term solution to be sure all children get health
care,” she said. “We need a state or federal program to be sure
that happens.”