Children’s Health Initiative

Creating and Marketing a New Health Insurance Initiative

Challenge

Santa Clara County was the first county in the nation to pledge to provide healthcare coverage for the County’s estimated 71,000 children without health insurance.. This was made possible by the groundbreaking comprehensive healthcare package and aggressive outreach program known as the Children’s Health Initiative (CHI).
PRxDigital helped to build and activate a coalition of community groups, including Working Partnerships USA, People Acting in Community Together (PACT), the County of Santa Clara Health and Hospital System, The Health Trust, and the Santa Clara Family Health Plan.
CHI provided health insurance coverage to uninsured children through three health plans: Medi-Cal, Healthy Families, and the Healthy Kids program for kids who could not be insured otherwise because of income or immigration status.
Healthy Kids was funded through California Prop 10 tobacco tax funds and was the essential component in helping reach the goal of making health insurance accessible to all children in the County.
A huge challenge was that most of the uninsured in the County were from under-served families who were not trusting of government entities, and who largely spoke languages other than English.

Strategies & Tactics

PRxDigital had to figure out how to coordinate and manage a multilingual community outreach campaign that included the following (all activities listed were conducted in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese):

PRxDigital was part of the task force that developed an innovative multi-lingual, personal health insurance marketing program in the Hispanic and Vietnamese communities, leveraging schools and churches to serve as trusted intermediaries with the community parents, so the advantages of health insurance could be shared, and we could help address fears of governmet.
PRxDigital designed, produced and distributed CHI and Healthy Kids collateral in three languages.
The grassroots community-based information campaign was expanded to Chambers of Commerce, doctor’s offices,, libraries, and other groups.
We coordinated speakers at Rotary and Kiwanis clubs throughout the County.
To take advantage of Spanish and Vietnamese media, we produced and placed public service announcements on radio and TV, and booked CHI community leaders on radio and TV public affairs shows
We developed and managed mainstream and targeted cultural media campaigns announcing the CHI and hosting critical sign-up events for parents at accessible locations throughout the county.

Results

CHI met its targeted enrollment in just two years. More significantly, according to a Kaiser study, the program had an immediate impact on children’s health, reducing gaps in access to both medical and dental care.