Analysis Plan: Increasing Medicaid Renewals with Text Message Reminders
Through an innovative pilot and evaluation, this project aims to improve ongoing Medicaid coverage using the Notify.gov service.
Many families struggle to get government services because they do not get the right information at the right time. To help address this, GSA’s Public Benefits Studio launched a new government notification service – Notify.gov. Partners who administer federally funded programs use the service to send text message reminders about government services and benefits programs.
As more government agencies send text messages, we want to make sure these text messages are effectively reaching the intended recipients and helping them meet their needs. In an ongoing project supporting the Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience, two GSA offices – the Public Benefits Studio and the Office of Evaluation Sciences — are collaborating with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the city of Norfolk, Virginia’s Department of Human Services, to utilize Notify.gov in connection with Norfolk’s administration of the federal Medicaid program. Norfolk DHS sends text message reminders via Notify.gov to families who need to renew their Medicaid coverage, and they want to evaluate how effective those messages are.
Together, we co-designed text message reminders and phone call outreach aimed at building trust and reaching clients at the right time with the right support. We are conducting a randomized evaluation of this outreach to assess whether it helps more clients renew their Medicaid coverage.
At the end of the evaluation period, we will measure whether enrollees who received the new outreach were more likely to renew their Medicaid coverage by their deadline compared to those who received the standard outreach. Because enrollees are randomly selected to receive the text outreach, we can determine whether the additional reminders directly cause an increase in renewals. For more details on how we will measure the success of the evaluation, see the attached evaluation plan.
By evaluating changes to Norfolk’s texting program, we can help people maintain their access to government services and learn how to make text messages from the government more effective.
Share this Example:
