Colorado Health Network’s Health Access department ended the 2026 Plan Year insurance open enrollment season with its strongest results to date — and did so in one of the most challenging policy environments the team has ever faced. CHN serves people living with HIV across Colorado, and ensuring those clients have access to stable, affordable health coverage is central to the organization’s mission.

With federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies reduced heading into this enrollment cycle, many clients were left navigating higher costs and fewer options. Against that backdrop, the Health Access team expanded its reach, helped more clients find sustainable coverage, and launched an innovative cross-departmental pilot that is already shaping how CHN prepares for the future.

Enrollment Numbers Tell the Story

The headline result: CHN enrolled 1,514 clients in either a Colorado Connect or Connect for Health Colorado Marketplace plan for 2026 — up 25% over the 2025 Plan Year achieved despite the added headwinds of reduced subsidy availability.

But raw enrollment numbers only tell part of the story. Clients who were contacted and did not engage with CHN staff were reduced by 14%, dropping to 329 in the 2026 Plan Year, meaning more clients are able to access the critical medical care that they need. And the number of clients who transitioned to alternative coverage, including employer-sponsored plans, Medicaid, or Medicare, more than doubled. Because these options are generally more cost-effective for the state than ACA Marketplace plans, connecting clients to them where appropriate represents both a financial win and a better long-term fit for many individuals.

“I could not be more proud of this team,” said Carly Emmel, Director of Health Access. “Year after year, they rise to the challenge, and this season — in the face of real policy headwinds — they delivered the remarkable results. That doesn’t happen without an enormous amount of dedication and heart.”

A New Model for Outreach: Cross-Departmental Collaboration

This season also saw the launch of a structured cross-departmental pilot between the Health Access and Client Services teams — designed not just to meet current demand, but to prepare CHN for a significant shift ahead.

Starting in 2026, changes to federal law mandate that Connect for Health Colorado shorten the open enrollment window to roughly 10 weeks. With nearly 2,000 clients relying on CHN for enrollment support, leadership recognized the need to test new capacity-building approaches now.

The pilot program blended enrollment support, outreach, and shared accountability across teams. Staff completed training, took on defined roles, and supported clients during one of the busiest periods of the year, with regional Associate Directors of Administration providing leadership oversight throughout the trial across the state.

What emerged was as much about organizational learning as enrollment outcomes. The pilot demonstrated that cross-training builds resilience — for individual teams and for the organization as a whole — and surfaced important insights about the training, supervision, and workload balance needed to make this kind of collaboration sustainable at scale. Those findings are exactly what this pilot program was designed to produce, and they will directly inform how CHN approaches future enrollment cycles.

Looking Ahead

The 2026 Open Enrollment season demonstrated what the Health Access team — and CHN as a whole — is capable of when working in alignment. As federal policy continues to shift and clients face an increasingly complex insurance coverage landscape, the ability to reach more people and connect them with the right options will only grow in importance. The results from this season, and the lessons from the pilot, set a strong foundation for what comes next.