Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, and that?s exactly how this quasi-public agency came to be.
“The main reason we were established was because legislation was enacted in 1997 that required people receiving Medicaid benefits in the state of Maryland to enroll in a managed health care organization,” Baltimore HealthCare Access Inc. Executive Director Kathleen Westcoat said. Every local health department across the state received funding to help people negotiate that system.
“Here [the city] came up with this quasi-public agency,” Westcoat said, noting that BHCA derives 90 percent of its $5 million annual budget from the Baltimore City Health Department. “They needed to get something up and running pretty quickly.”
Westcoat, who supervises a staff of 85 at the interference-running nonprofit, says BHCA has three core concentrations: an eligibility unit of 25 workers who assist ? and case manage ? eligible Baltimore City children and pregnant women enroll in Maryland Medicaid and the Children?s Health Insurance Program; a cadre of 45 specialists who seek out and assist city residents struggling with health care procedures or who have dropped out of the system; and an outreach effort to non-qualifying or unregistered vulnerable residents (immigrants, drug-users, HIV/AIDS-affected, the disabled) to help direct them to appropriate community resources.
“It?s just been a really good partnership [with BHCA],” Bayview Care-A-Van coordinator Pat Letke-Alexander said. “They provide services directly to the community in the community … answering questions, signing people up for benefits, and sorting out the system.”
According to Westcoat, BHCA has enrolled 35,000 children and pregnant women in the free, “very comprehensive,” residency and income-based MCHIP; and conducts some 60,000 outreach visits a year.
Its buprenorphine ? a heroin addiction-inhibiting drug ? project seeks to recruit city doctors for training as dispensers of the drug to the city?s estimated 30,000 heroin addicts, and its new “Project Health” program enlists college students as volunteers at city clinics and treatment centers.
“They?re very responsive, and they really understand the value of the service they provide, hooking up families with local services,” Baltimore Center for Infant and Child Loss Director Donna Becker said.
More information
» Baltimore HealthCare Access Inc.
201 E. Baltimore St., Ste950
» Phone: 410-649-0521
» Website: www.bhca.org
