The Challenge

With Medi-Cal redetermination resumed and millions of Californians at risk of losing coverage, CHCs faced mounting pressure to identify patients, reach them through culturally appropriate channels, assist with complex applications, and report efforts back to the state. Manual reporting via spreadsheets posed challenges to accurately quantify results. CPCA searched for a system that could track outcomes; log and categorize interactions, whether through phone calls, texts, in person support, or follow-up care coordination; and generate aggregate reporting by age, language, race and ethnicity.

“There was a lot of urgency. We had to mobilize a statewide network of health centers and make sure their navigators had the tools to track outreach, report assistance, and avoid duplication.” 

Nataly Tellez, Director of Strategic Initiatives at CPCA

The Solution

To support this effort, CPCA leveraged Azara Care Connect, an outreach and outcome tracking platform, that allowed health centers to record their Medi-Cal enrollment efforts in real time.

"We were working with many different community health center organizations, consortia, and health navigators across California,” said Tellez. “Having one platform that let everyone log encounters, track outcomes, and stay aligned was critical.”

Each navigator could document encounters, including application assistance, redetermination help, and care navigation, within a standardized platform that fed into centralized reporting. These encounters were logged across organizations, allowing CPCA to monitor outreach efforts at the local level and aggregate performance metrics for state reporting. “Care Connect gave us a scalable way to track this work,” added Tellez. “We could see activity across organizations and regions and roll up results to DHCS.” The platform’s flexibility enabled health centers to tailor workflows to their unique internal systems while maintaining a unified structure for statewide reporting.

The Results

Between January 2024 and June 2025, the Health Enrollment Navigators Project, supported by DHCS, CPCA, Consortia, CHCs, Azara Healthcare, and community partners realized major impact:

159k+ individuals enrolled or re-enrolled in Medi-Cal

1.3M individuals reached through direct outreach

17.3M+ media impressions via mass media campaigns and public education

290k+residents received hands-on application assistance

391k+ people received help accessing and utilizing health care services 

The Azara Care Connect platform was instrumental in tracking and validating these efforts. Navigators across the state logged outreach encounters, enrollment assistance, redeterminations, and navigation activities in real time, giving CPCA and DHCS an in-depth understanding of the project’s impact.

“Azara Care Connect helped us move from relying on anecdotal stories to using concrete data,” said Tellez. “We could demonstrate how this funding translated into real lives helped, real coverage gained, and real time data that informed the next steps.”

The Health Enrollment Navigators Project highlights what’s possible when policy, technology and community-based care align.

Looking Ahead

The current grant cycle ended in June 2025, but CPCA and Azara are exploring other ways to partner. Azara Care Connect has shown its potential not just for enrollment initiatives, but for broader community health improvement efforts, enabling frontline teams to track social drivers of health, manage outreach programs, and strengthen care navigation for the long term. As states nationwide face Medicaid renewal pressures and expanding health equity efforts, California’s success offers a roadmap, and Azara’s technology offers the infrastructure to support it.