MHP Salud’s Connect and Care Initiative aims to improve health care access for underserved community members by providing information on health care services and offering application assistance to available social programs. Additionally, MHP Salud currently operates one of two Navigator projects in Texas – which help community members access the Health Insurance Marketplace. We have extensive experience providing enrollment assistance to underserved, hard-to-reach communities.

Our Connect and Care initiative is unique in that it bridges the gap across all of our initiatives. If someone is receiving MHP Salud services, their Community Health Workers are trained to identify what criteria community members need to meet to qualify for assistance, how to complete applications, and how to provide referrals as appropriate.  In certain cases, individuals may just need help to complete the application process. However, in many cases, we find that individuals are otherwise completely unaware of the benefits available to them. By being able to identify that community members may qualify for health and social services outside of the scope of the original initiative, CHWs bridge a critical gap in services.

Some of these benefits include Medicaid, CHIP, SNAP, TANF, and several others. From 2016-2018, CHWs assisted with 1,324 applications for CHIP and Medicaid.