Strategic Development and Implementation Support for Children’s Coverage Enrollment Drives

While the State’s insurance coverage policies for children are relatively expansive, many who are eligible remain without coverage.

The New York State Department of Health’s Office of Health Insurance Programs (OHIP) set the goal to inform families about the availability of coverage and to enroll eligible uninsured children and teenagers. Under this grant, Spitfire Strategies (Spitfire) designed and supported focused enrollment drives to promote the expansion of children’s health insurance coverage in New York. Spitfire developed a strategic communications plan with the messages, approaches, and tactics to create a sufficient buzz around enrollment drives in target communities.

This project was part of a larger NYHealth authorization that funded a series of quick-strike analyses to help the New York State Department of Health’s (NYSDOH’s) Office of Health Insurance programs find ways to streamline and expand its public health insurance programs.

Read an NYHealth special report that contains a summary of findings from this authorization.

NYHealth has learned from similar work that media campaigns and enrollment drives work well to increase enrollments and renewals in public health insurance programs, but their success is limited to the time period of the campaign itself. This issue emerged under an NYHealth-sponsored campaign run by Public Health Solutions to increase awareness among Chinese non-English speaking Medicaid beneficiaries about re-enrollment.