Supporting State Agencies With Medicaid Unwinding Outreach: Creating a Multi-Lingual Two-Way Messaging System

Abstract

During the COVID-19 public health emergency, a continuous coverage requirement was put in place for Medicaid beneficiaries, meaning millions were automatically reenrolled in healthcare coverage without needing to renew eligibility. The forthcoming expiration of this requirement presents one of the largest-ever health coverage transition events, and states will need to move quickly to return to normal eligibility and enrollment operations.

A key focus for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and state Medicaid agencies is making sure those eligible for Medicaid maintain coverage and supporting transition to alternatives, such as subsidized Marketplace coverage, for others.

Medicaid agencies need to conduct outreach to make their millions of members aware of the process for redetermination. When information is physically mailed to enrollees, those who have changed their address, moved, or are homeless, may be at risk of missing the alert and losing coverage. However, new guidance from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has made an important determination to allow government agencies to use calling and texting to verify Medicaid beneficiaries’ current addresses so the reenrollment materials reach them.

With cloud-based tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS), state agencies can conduct this outreach using no code/low code, serverless, elastic services that can scale to two billion text messages a day.

In this blog post, learn how to set up a multi-lingual, interactive SMS message campaign that can automatically verify and update member information on file based on member responses. Then, learn how to monitor the campaign’s effectiveness and response rates in a visual dashboard.