Programming Note: Families USA Health Action 2018 Conference!

Instead of my own description, I'll let the National Association of Health Access Assisters explain:

Health Action 2018 Kicks Off the Hottest Ticket for Assisters
by Heather Bates & Liz Hagan

If you work on enrollment or support enrollment-related work, we are excited to announce new opportunities available at Health Action this year! Thanks to our host, Families USA, the National Association of Health Access Assisters (NAHAA) will launch officially at #HA2018. With four in-depth workshops and several networking opportunities, trust us that this year is not to be missed.

NAHAA’s first workshop to kick things off, Make the Money Follow You: Diversifying Funding Models to Support Consumer Assistance, will provide ideas for different approaches to fundraising that other assister models are using to accomplish their mission. Make sure to bring your notepad and your creative thinking! We will be featuring the Kaiser Family Foundation, introducing the NAHAA staff, and you can even meet our founding steering committee members from around the country to talk about trends in enrollment and consumer assistance, and discuss the future of this work. We are especially excited to have a special guest: the creator of “ACA SignUps”, Charles Gaba, who will blog for us during this session and capture the most salient themes.

Two other workshops worthy of mention include, Tell Your Program Story, which is about using data, analytics, and stories to strategically share the valuable work health access assisters are doing within the health care delivery system. Put simply, as evidenced by this year’s enrollment numbers, people value and want coverage, and there is a strong story to be told about that. See our latest blog post on four key takeaways from this past open enrollment. To bring it all home, our final workshop session will be a world café discussion where we will “speed date” through a variety of relevant topics so you can learn from one another and grow your programs. This will give you the full experience of being a member of NAHAA! We promise you that, by the end of these two days, you will be glad you came, glad you stayed, and ready to share the story about the incredible work that you do.

This will be a first for me: First time attending the Families USA Health Action Conference, which runs from January 25th - 27th in DC; first time officially live-blogging an event I'm attending (I kinda/sorta liveblogged a couple of the televised primary debates two years ago, but that's not the same). Should be interesting, hope I don't embarrass them and myself.