Community Health Initiative of Orange County

When a Community Health Initiative Goes Beyond Healthcare Access

The Community Health Initiative of Orange County (CHI OC) works to implement, support, and coordinate county-wide programs to provide healthcare access to uninsured and underserved children and families.

Our Shared Goal

To improve the lives of OC’s children and families by connecting them with the many health and support programs available.

The Challenge

The leaders at CHI OC wanted to do more than just the minimum.

For years, they had been successfully using One-e-App (OeA) to assist and enroll vulnerable children and families in critical health insurance programs, including Medi-Cal, Kaiser Permanente’s Child Health Program, and the Child Health and Disability Prevention Program (CHDP). Using our web-based system, they reduced application loss and errors, streamlined the application process, and lessened the manual burdens of administration and data entry.

But the committed folks at CHI OC wanted to ensure that OC families could truly thrive, and that meant going beyond healthcare.

Our Solution

So in 2011, Alluma worked with the CHI OC team to expand their OeA platform for easy, integrated, and streamlined ways to collect the information required for four additional social services and assistance programs:

• CalFresh
• California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) 
• Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)
• California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE)

A critical challenge at the time was getting approval to implement an electronic interface to CalWIN (California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids Information Network) in a number of counties. Though Orange County Social Services (OC SSA) was initially reluctant about the idea, CHI OC was undaunted and worked hard to forge an alliance. They were able to successfully get the OC SSA to assign staff to use OeA to take up, review, and register applications for Medi-Cal, CalFresh, and CalWORKs. That arrangement is still intact today, enabling CHI OC and its partners to assist with complete applications which OC SSA accepts and registers, ensuring a faster, more seamless experience for the families they serve.

Recognizing the importance of renewals and decreasing churn, CHI OC has also fully leveraged the management and tracking capabilities of OeA. Recently in a meeting with the California Department of Rehabilitation, CHI OC representatives credited OeA as key to their follow up program that helps them ensure their customers complete the eligibility and enrollment processes, access covered benefits, and renew their benefits on time.

While the healthcare coverage landscape has changed dramatically over the years, CHI OC has stayed true to their purpose, while proactively taking a broader view of how to serve their community.

Our Impact

We are proud to work with CHI OC to connect more than 162,000 people to critical support programs. By maximizing the capabilities of OeA with CHI OC, we went beyond just an application for health coverage. OC families are now connected to the health, food, employment, and economic services they need through one trusted community source.