California MCOs, Public Health Depts. Discover Benefits of Collaboration

Data sharing and staff contacts are the keys to improving collaboration between Medicaid managed care organizations and public health departments, according to California officials and plan staffers. Leaders from managed care plans say that close collaboration improves outcomes for high-needs populations who struggle with one or more social barriers to health. 

“When you're looking at claims data, we're obviously not going to see a claim for homelessness. We’re not going to be able to capture that. But when we take our data and bump it against data that's available to some of the public health jurisdictions, and we find out that some of our members are facing housing instability, then that also gives us the ability to understand that maybe their health outcomes are directly being affected by these social determinants of health,” said Nishtha Patel, manager of care transformation at Inland Empire Health Plan (IEHP), during a March 21 Manatt LLP webinar. “No matter what we do intervention-wise, if we're not addressing those, their health outcomes are not ever going to improve.”