Bert Nash Center is a program partner for OneCare Kansas
If a program could help reduce hospital and emergency room visits and also improve a person’s overall mental and physical health, what’s not to like?
That program is OneCare Kansas.
OneCare Kansas provides extra support for those who have a serious health condition and are part of KanCare, the program that administers Medicaid for the state of Kansas.
Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center is a OneCare Kansas partner in Douglas County, along with Heartland Community Health Center.
“OneCare is an opt-in program,” said Donna Powers, Bert Nash Center Medical Services program manager. “One of our roles as a program partner is to help facilitate that process.”
Each month, Bert Nash Center receives a list of eligible clients from the state’s three managed care organizations that serve the Medicaid program in Kansas.
“We then reach out to active clients by calling them and introducing them to the OneCare program over the phone,” said Tunmi Adebanjo, OneCare program manager for the Bert Nash Center. “At that point, they can let us know if they are interested and we get the opt-in letter to them.”
Under normal circumstances, those client meetings and other outreach efforts to promote the OneCare program could have been conducted in person. But the statewide launch of the OneCare Kansas program coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic. The program was launched April 1st.
“The program got off to a slow start, because with the pandemic people have had other things on their minds,” said Sara Godinez, Bert Nash Center’s Community Support Services program manager, who oversees OneCare for the Center. “But things are going in the right direction. By Aug. 1, we will have doubled the number of people served by the program. We’re working really hard to get people signed up.”
To qualify for the program, someone must be part of KanCare and have asthma, paranoid schizophrenia, or severe bipolar disorder.
The OneCare Kansas program provides an additional layer of support services for those who qualify. Once a client opts in to the program, Tunmi and Julie Cooper, OneCare program supervisor for the Bert Nash Center, work with the client to develop a health action plan, a list of goals the client wants to focus on.
“We work really hard to emphasize that this is in conjunction with the services the client is already receiving,” Cooper said.
Peer support is another important part of that additional layer of support. Susan Murphy, a Bert Nash Center peer support specialist, will work directly with OneCare clients.
“Susan is going out into the community and doing a lot of frontline work,” Godinez said. “We can’t overemphasize the importance of peer support in the program. The significance of that can’t be overstated.”
