November 27, 2024

During the 130^th CSAC Annual Meeting in Los Angeles County, the Health and Human Services (HHS) and Administration of Justice (AOJ) policy teams convened a panel of county leaders from Inyo, Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Yuba, as well as leadership from the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), to discuss best practices and implementation of the California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal Justice-Involved (CalAIM JI) Initiative, also known as the Justice-Involved Reentry Initiative.

What is CalAIM JI?

The CalAIM JI brings a targeted set of pre-release Medicaid services into specific correctional facilities, including for youth, and requires extensive preparatory work. Broadly, the goal of this initiative is to ensure continuity in healthcare coverage between carceral settings and the community, including “behavioral health links,” or the professional-to-professional hand-off into post-release settings. On the ground implementation will adhere to a phased-in approach, with the earliest go-live date being October 1, 2024.  Read more about the initiative here.

Workshop Recap and Key Takeaways

The counties of Inyo, Santa Clara, and Yuba are early implementors of the initiative, receiving approval from DHCS to go-live last month, and the County of San Mateo intends to go-live along with a few other counties in early 2025. View your county’s readiness status here. A representative of the state, as well as a mix of urban, suburban, and rural counties, workshop panelists offered attendees an opportunity to hear how different size and capacity counties are navigating their way through implementation. DHCS opened the workshop with an overview of CalAIM JI, which included the federal Medicare inmate exclusion policy and broader state efforts to transform Medi-Cal as a whole. County leaders emphasized the importance of early and consistent implementation planning and care coordination across local departments and seeking technical clarification and further guidance from the state. Notably, panelists highlighted successes in designating an individual/s to specifically manage the program in their county, recognizing the complexity of the initiative and the impact it has across departments and their systems.

Workshop content is available on the CSAC website HERE. Please feel free to contact CSAC staff with any questions. We also encourage you to share information, best practices, successes, and barriers that you experience in your county with CalAIM JI implementation:

• Jolie Onodera, Senior Legislative Advocate, HHS: jonodera@counties.org
• Ryan Morimune, Senior Legislative Advocate, AOJ: rmorimune@counties.org
• Danielle Bradley, Legislative Analyst, HHS: dbradley@counties.org
• Michaela Stone, Legislative Analyst, AOJ: mstone@counties.org