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In this biennium, the last two years, the number one priority of the
Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services has
been to enroll one hundred thousand kids in Healthy Montana Kids.
We have more than six hundred trained enrollment partners,
who are present in every single county in Montana.
The Parents Take Control of Your Health Program is an initiative
by the Indian Health Board of Billings.
The audience we’re trying to reach for this particular grant
is American Indian children and it’s to enroll them in the state’s
Healthy Montana Kids children’s health insurance program.
We do a lot of good here. We are an urban Indian facility.
What we have here is we have a clinic, a walk-in clinic, we have a
diabetic clinic, women’s health, substance abuse
and mental health services as well as our CHIPRA grant.
We partnered with the state and we became one of their enrollment partners
whereby we were able to process applications electronically.
That has worked very well, the state has been a very good partner with us.
One of the most effective ways that we have for partners and
families to connect with Healthy Montana Kids is our toll-free helpline.
When you dial the help number, you actually get to talk
to a real person. The state’s very good at contacting us when
there is a change. They’ve been supportive in that they come on our
Medicine Wheel program. It’s a television program that the
Indian Health Board has been producing for about twenty years now.
Healthy Montana Kids, we try to bring that up in every segment of the show.
I think the absolute best tactic that works with a diverse population is
empowering them to find the solutions themselves.
I think the most effective methods of our outreach have been
with the school district and the Head Start program. In the Billings
Public School system, there’s roughly four thousand
Indian students going to school here.
They came to us and set up a booth in various Middle Schools and High Schools.
We are a very visible part of the schools’ open houses.
It was an open communication and it was non-threatening for the
parents and the kids to get involved.
Head Start makes space available for us so we can do our outreach,
we can talk to people.
They went to all kinds of events where Native families were likely to
be in attendance and sat down with them personally and provided
them with individual help.
We find that we do have access to an awful lot of Indian families.
It looks like it’s going to be a child that you need to handle.
I’ll give you the information...If you have youngsters who are native
and who need health care and you’re having trouble
getting the connections made, get a collaboration going,
and that’s what Indian Health Board has done for us.
When we initially wrote this grant, we were going to enroll
twenty people every six months or something of that nature.
We’ve well exceeded that in the first year. We’ve more than tripled
that number as a matter of fact.
And with the support we’ve had from the folks at the state,
the members of the community, I think we’ll continue to be successful.
In the end it’s really those local individuals that will help us get kids
enrolled in this program. People that the families trust, you know,
whether it be a doctors office, a school...
It’s having that commitment which is heralded from our department,
from our governor, that this is what’s important and we make these
connections and relationships work because what we’re doing
is for the best of the children in our state.