March 4, 2021
NCDHHS Secretary, Dr. Mandy Cohen, updated the Joint House and Senate Appropriations Committee for Health and Human Services this morning on the department’s key COVID-19 accomplishments and implementation of 2020 budget initiatives.
NCDHHS quickly ramped up COVID-19 testing access across the state last year, including its innovative universal testing strategy within skilled nursing facilities that has been cited as a national model by the Rockefeller Foundation. The department administered over 7 million COVID-19 tests and stood up 750 testing sites across the state, in addition to distributing 751,600 antigen tests to partners. NCDHHS also developed a robust contact tracing system and hired 1,560 contact tracers, while also launching the SlowCOVIDNC exposure notification app that over 600,000 users in the state downloaded.
NCDHHS has worked with stakeholders to develop over 120 guidance resources to help businesses and individuals conduct activities safely, including the Strong Schools NC Toolkit to provide guidance for K-12 students to safely return to the classroom for in-person instruction. In addition, the department distributed over 65 million pieces of PPE across the state, performed 16 on-site industrial hygiene consultations in food processing plants, and launched a nationally-recognized 3Ws public prevention campaign statewide. To improve food security, NCDHHS also provided over $753 million in Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT) benefits to 1.1 million children at risk of hunger, and increased Food and Nutritional Services (FNS) to approximately 360,000 households.
With behavioral health needs on the rise during the pandemic, NCDHHS stood up the Hope4NC Helpline to connect North Carolinians to additional mental health supports during times of crisis, along with the Hope4Healers Helpline in partnership with the NC Psychological Foundation to provide mental health and resilience supports for health care workers, first responders, teachers, child care workers, and school personnel. Early on in the pandemic, the department also created flexibilities and updated telehealth policies to prevent disruptions in behavioral health services delivery during the pandemic. 92% of respondents in a recent survey reported that they were able to get the support they needed via telehealth through their mental health service provider.
NCDHHS also created a Support Services program and employed over 400 community health workers to connect 180,000 North Carolinians to medical, behavioral and social supports. More than 26,000 services were delivered to 5,500 households who needed to isolate or quarantine, including food, relief payments, or primary medical care. Duke University Health System was awarded a contract to administer this program for Durham Granville, and Vance County residents. North Carolina has also been a leader with COVID-19 data transparency. NCDHHS’ COVID-19 dashboard was rated A+ by the COVID-19 Tracking Project, and was featured as a national model by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Bloomberg News also recently ranked North Carolina as best in the nation for publicly reporting race and ethnicity vaccination data.
The department has also helped to quickly scale up the state’s vaccine distribution efforts. The Kaiser Family Foundation recently ranked North Carolina as the first in the nation for vaccinating the largest share of its population of older adults, with over 60% of adults over the age of 65 who are vaccinated. North Carolina also led the nation by investing in comprehensive market research to understand vaccine confidence in historically marginalized populations, and built equity into all aspects of vaccine operations. This includes allocating additional vaccine doses go to counties with higher numbers of historically marginalized populations, providing clear expectations for providers, and supporting events to focus on underserved communities.
The committee then received an update on the current state of NCFAST. NCFAST is a program that was created in 2012 to improve the way that NCDHHS and county departments of social services do business and integrate services. Moving forward, NCFAST plans to modernize in order to improve current technology challenges. The current system is a tightly coupled platform that causes deficiencies in user experience, and difficulty with scaling up and scaling down infrastructure. In the future, NCFAST plans to move to the Cloud in order to improve user experience, modularize child welfare, decrease downtime, and improve scalability to serve rural and urban counties equally
Secretary Cohen also gave an update on Medicaid Managed Care, which is set to go live on July 1st. Medicaid transformation will allow the state to invest in primary care and local care management, incentivize quality improvement and value-based care, focus on whole-person care, and increase budget predictability. NCDHHS began a soft launch of transformation this week, and statewide enrollment is scheduled to begin on March 15th. For beneficiaries who don’t opt-in to a plan during open enrollment, NCDHHS will use an algorithm to assign them a plan. The department is also in conversations with providers and the prepaid health plans on contract negotiations in order to maximize the number of in-network providers for Medicaid beneficiaries.