now we will hear from her last speaker rebecca mendoza who is the chip c.h.i.p. director and the director of maternal and child health division at the department of medical services. tell us about what you learned in virginia over the course of this project. what were the major takeaways for you and how that is affecting enrollment under medicaid. we want to make the obvious point that so far these two states have not expanded their medicaid program. we will see what happens in alabama. by and large we are talking about people eligible for the existing program pre-expansion. when we applied for the maximizing enrollment grant we were really squarely focused on building a data warehouse. that was the main purpose of our grand. at that point is in time we had to eligibility systems similar to alabama. we had one for local departments of social services that administer our medicaid program at the local level and we had another one for centralized chip prague -- processing unit. in addition to that we had our system of record for enrollment in medicaid and c.h.i.p. a

and rebecca mendoza of the department virginia department of services and alice weiss who is our own urban institute, one of the country's leading experts on innovative enrollment and retention strategies in health care. to moderate the discussion and ensure it is a real conversation and not just dualing talking heads, we're excited to have susan denseler, who is previously served as both the editor in chief for health affairs very important influential magazine and health correspondent for our favorite news program, whatever our duty -- it's a wonderful institution and we're proud to have you here, susan. >> it is my honor to introduce before we get to the panel one last person which is lori epstein, a program officer at the foundation since 2001. and she leads their max enroll work and responsible for the foundation's largest programs covering kids and families. here at the urban institute we have a wonderful partnership and we're enormously grateful for their john going support of the health policy research and it's a delight to have you with us today. thank you. >> thank you, sar

. >> thank you very much, gretel, and of course, gretel is und under -- so we have rebecca mendoza, assistant to medical services. rebecca, tell us what you all learned in virginia during the course of this project? what were the measured takeaways for you, and how that is affecting enrollment today. we want to point out these two states, alabama and virginia, have not expanded their medical program. by and large now, we're talking about people visiting the extended. >> when we first started, we were mainly focused on building a data warehouse, and that was the focus of our grant. we had two eligibility systems very similar to alabama. we had one for 120 local departments of social services that administer our medicaid program at the local level, and we had another one for our centralized chip processing unit. then in addition to that, we had our system of record for enrollment in medicaid and chip, our official record that also paid our claims. we really wanted to take data from those three different systems and combine it so we could do better analysis of what was happening with an enrollme