New Opportunities with Enhanced Care Management
New Opportunities with Enhanced Care Management: Increasing Success for San Francisco Families with Children Ages 0–5 in Family Maintenance
Every family involved in San Francisco’s child welfare system has a unique story and set of needs. Access to necessary supports can help vulnerable families stay together. Increasingly, many of these supports can be funded, at least in part, by the Medi-Cal program. New Medi-Cal services—Community Health Workers (CHW) and Enhanced Care Management (ECM)—offer navigation support. Fortunately, children involved with child welfare, including Family Maintenance cases, are a priority population, but participation has been low. In the first half of 2024, less than 2% of eligible children and youth involved in child welfare were enrolled in ECM services.
In this paper we describe a hypothetical scenario based on real-world experiences, to illustrate what ECM might look like for a Family Maintenance case involving children ages 0–5 in San Francisco. Using a concrete example spurred conversation among key partners to identify implementation challenges and key questions, such as how ECM can be additive and not duplicative to services provided today, who should make referrals, how they should do it, and what information should be shared with whom.