The San Francisco Human Services Agency (HSA) supports individuals, families, and communities with food, health care, financial, employment, child care, and protective services. It is responsible for administering Medi-Cal - California’s Medicaid health program. This program pays for a variety of medical services for children and adults with limited income and resources. Medi-Cal is supported by federal and state taxes. In 2022, Civic Edge began working with HSA to develop an online Medi-Cal handbook. This handbook would bring together information and resources for the first time, making it easier for staff to share, search, and find information. In streamlining information, the goal of the handbook is to improve how healthcare is administered.
Our team started by interviewing and engaging HSA team members across HSA departments. Input from this early feedback provided insights on current challenges or constraints, priorities, and, at times, differing interests where compromises would need to be found. Based on the feedback received, Civic Edge recommended an online platform that had the additional benefit of being adapted for future HSA projects. We then worked closely with HSA to organize complex, deeply interwebbed content into a clear table of contents and to build out the online platform. Development of the online platform included creation of a style guide and easy “how to’s” to introduce new HSA team members for working within the platform, office hours, preparation and documentation of online trainings, and setup for a feedback session to receive input while the handbook was still in test phases.
In the last three months of the project, Civic Edge received direction from SFHSA to build out the handbook using a different online platform. We switched gears quickly, adapting the content development and review process, revising templates, and building out the framework of the handbook within the new platform to fit SFHSA’s needs. Before the contract expiration, our team completed the upload of draft content, recorded five “how-to” videos for using the online platform, and drafted a 32-page user guide for maintaining handbook content.