With a little more than a year to go before state health insurance Exchanges must be open for business, states are under tremendous pressure to develop an enrollment system that will meet the needs of consumers. The tremendous complexity involved in the development of an eligibility and enrollment system has required states to invest an enormous amount of resources and time to successfully complete the project. One of the ways that Oregon has found to meet this challenge has been through formal and informal collaborations, through which it has learned as much as it can from other states and available resources.

These formal and informal collaborations have allowed Oregon to make progress in its effort to create an integrated Medicaid/Exchange enrollment system. One of Oregon’s most fruitful collaborations has been with Enroll UX 2014. Enroll UX 2014 is a collaboration that involves the federal government, 11 states and several charitable foundations to develop the design specifications and prototype for an online process for application, eligibility determination, enrollment, and health plan selection.

This month Nora Leibowitz, Chief of Policy, Evaluation and Research, and Amy Fauver, Deputy Director of the Cover Oregon, (formerly Oregon Health Insurance Exchange Corporation), share their insights about how such collaborations have helped put Oregon ahead of the game. Read the attached interview with these two leaders of Oregon’s effort.