The Vision for Care Coordination

Did you know that WWC sees the Care Coordination Grant Program (CCGP) as one of our main efforts going forward? While we will always continue to provide clinical services to those eligible women who do not have health insurance, we have seen the need for WWC to pay for these services drop drastically after the full implementation of Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Medicaid Expansion. In fact, many of these women are still being seen at the clinics WWC funds - they just have a different payer source. 

What hasn't changed drastically - and some might say has increased - is the need to navigate women through the system to help ensure they complete cancer screenings and follow-up. WWC Clinical Services funding includes patient navigation and case management fees for each client, but for many agencies, after the implementation of ACA, there was not a funding source for patient navigation and case management now that these women had Medicaid or private insurance for their care. And thus care coordination was born! The seed for this program was called Connect 2 Care. With Connect 2 Care, WWC reimbursed agencies to provide patient navigation and case management services for clients who had other funding sources (such as Medicaid, Medicare, private insurance, self pay, Title X, foundation funds) for their breast and cervical cancer screening, then in fiscal year 2014, WWC piloted care coordination with two agencies (who now also participate in CCGP). WWC released the CCGP request for application (RFA) in October 2014 and funded 14 agencies whose contracts began in the spring of 2015. WWC released a second RFA in June 2015 to continue to add and expand the program. 

In the future (July 2017 and beyond), WWC hopes to combine the Clinical Services and CCGP contracts so that every eligible women gets patient navigation and case management and then agencies can use funds to pay for clinical services if needed. What are your thoughts on the vision for the Women’s Wellness Connection program?