Center for Health Care Strategies

The Affordable Care Act provides states with a new option to provide intensive coordinated services through health homes for Medicaid populations with multiple chronic conditions.

In 2012, the New York Health Foundation (NYHealth) awarded the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS) a grant to establish a statewide learning collaborative to support the new health home initiative launched by the State that same year. The collaborative gave health home providers a forum to share their early implementation successes and challenges, engage in peer-to-peer learning, identify best practices, and guide future policymaking. The learning collaborative has been a success, building the capacity of health home providers so that they may thrive in this new environment. In 2014, NYHealth awarded CHCS a grant to continue the learning collaborative through June 2016.

Under this grant, CHCS facilitated a total of six in-person meetings that were open to all health homes in the State and hosted up to four small group discussions of 20-30 participants for health homes to explore critical implementation and programmatic issues in greater depth with State officials from key agencies. CHCS offered structured technical assistance sessions around the use of the new data portal released by the State, which provides health homes with access to performance-related data at both the program and the patient levels. It continued to host an online community for exclusive use by health home providers, which promoted and shared additional content, such as patient success stories or successful health home strategies. Finally, CHCS prepared and released an issue brief to highlight and disseminate the key findings from the learning collaborative and hosted a national webinar on the brief’s release to share insights gleaned from this project with a broad audience of Medicaid stakeholders.