The Challenge

• 90+ Million Medicaid enrollees needed to renew coverage for the first time in 3 years. Millions enrolled for the first time during the PHE and had never experienced a renewal before. Millions had moved, had kids, or changed jobs.

• States experienced difficulty creating a compliant ex-parte renewal process, reinstating wrongfully disenrolled individuals, pausing procedural determinations, and crafting plain language notices for affected households.

The Opportunity

• Pilot a digital technical assistance program, that works in parallel, but separate from Medicaid policy teams
• Demonstrate the value of CMS deepening its understand of legacy tech systems, highlighting the opportunity to invest in more open-source, agile systems

The Solution: Technical Assistance As A Service

As an emergency pilot program, I worked closely with our team lead to streamline and iterate on our operations.

After our first month of preliminary conversations, I noticed that the time it took to onboard and start delivering technical assistance to states kept increasing. Our team experienced tension when trying to decide when to reach out to partners and how we planned on facilitating workshops that could lead to actually starting TA delivery.

To address this, I designed an iterative Service Design Blueprint to align our team on our onboarding and TA delivery process, this blueprint included:

• Steps within each phase (Onboarding and introduction, Technical Assistance, Handoff)
• Defining the step’s purpose and outcomes
• Artifacts we expect to create internally and/or share with our stakeholders
• Touchpoints (Calendar invites, emails, follow ups)
• Whether stakeholders for that step are owners, influencers, or informed parties

Defining the Scope

I designed two workshop designs (Needs Assessment & Goal-Setting) as part of our onboarding process, focusing in on problem definition.

As a facilitator, I navigated any breaks from our preplanned structure by embracing it -- using it as an opportunity to further clarify what a state needed to convey. This also allowed me to iterate on the workshop designs, making space for ambiguity for our team and the participants.

Building Trust with Communication

This project was my office’s first time in years collaborating closely with the Center for Medicaid. As a scrappy, digitally focused team, clear, consistent communication was essential for building and maintaining trust.

As the operations lead, I designed and distributed the following artifacts:

• Weekly Update
• Workshop Summaries
• State Engagement Letter
• State Handoff Guides

• Team Coda Workspace

State Engagement Letter: