Health Share has welcomed thousands of new members as part of the Healthier Oregon Program–many of whom were previously covered by Cover All Kids and Cover All People. Health Share also welcomed members with CCOF, who receive dental and NEMT coverage. In addition, we have made enhancements to demographic information.

Supporting New Areas of Membership Growth and Demographic Information Enhancements

In late 2022, Health Share welcomed thousands of new members initially part of the Cover All Kids and later Cover All People populations into the Healthier Oregon Program (HOP). Many of them had relationships with providers in health centers (specifically FQHCs) that we have in our networks, and we wanted to assign members to partners and PCPs that aligned with them. Because this information wasn’t included with member enrollments, we developed a process to get this information directly from health centers as new HOP members arrive on our plan. While beneficial to both members and providers, this is a labor-intensive process for some clinics that are manually handling these. We worked with OCHIN, a company that provides electronic health records services to FQHCs, to automate the process for their customers and allow this process to continue operationally. 

On the subject of membership growth, at the beginning of this year, we had about 7,000 new members get coverage through CCOF. This plan includes coverage for dental and non-emergent medical transportation (NEMT) services only. Because of the scope of coverage, these members were assigned to CareOregon. OHA gave us information about members’ prior Dental Care Organizations, and CareOregon worked to assign members to those DCO’s to maintain continuity of care. 

Demographic Information Enhancements

One of the strategies we share with OHA to provide a foundation for improving health equity is enriching demographic information about our members. Standards have emerged over recent years for Race, Ethnicity, Language, and Disability (REALD) enabling much more complete and precise information gathering, and OHA has started to send enrollment data using these standards and will be adding more as members renew their enrollments. Several systems, databases, and analytics tools have required updates based on these changes, and additional improvements will be implemented going forward.