After years of pleading from the child welfare community, the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services recently rolled out a Medicaid plan that’s designed to simplify care for children and young adults in the child welfare system — a population that state officials say has long struggled to navigate a fragmented health care landscape.

About 32,000 children in foster care and former foster youth were automatically enrolled in the state’s Children and Families Specialty Plan when it launched on Dec. 1. Among other things, the program aims to prevent disruptions in services for children who had been receiving care in a different county before they entered the foster system.