Sarah Triano is the associate director of long-term services and supports (LTSS) and disability policy at the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS). In this role, she co-leads a CHCS portfolio supporting state Medicaid agencies and stakeholders to improve health access and outcomes for people with Medicaid who are older adults, have disabilities, and/or are dually eligible for Medicaid and Medicare. To her role, Sarah brings lived experience as a woman with lifelong disabilities and more than 30 years of disability-policy experience, including deep subject matter expertise in fee-for-service and managed Medicaid LTSS, integrated care for dually eligible individuals, and integration of LTSS with physical and behavioral health care.
Sarah has experience leading and working in corporate, state government, and nonprofit environments. Prior to joining CHCS, Sarah was the senior director of complex care policy and innovation for Centene Corporation, where she provided support and technical assistance to 15 managed LTSS and Medicare-Medicaid health plans across the country serving 400,000 consumers with disabilities. Under her leadership, Centene launched the Provider Accessibility Initiative (PAI) which distributed over $1.4 million in grants to doctors’ offices to make disability improvements. The PAI increased access to preventive care for over 186,000 people with disabilities in the U.S. and earned Centene the 2019 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Health Equity Award.
Prior to Centene, Sarah served as an appointee in California Governor Brown’s administration where she advised the secretaries of the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency and Health and Human Services Agency on a comprehensive disability health and employment strategy. During that period, California’s disability labor force participation rate rose from 32 percent to 34 percent.
Sarah also served on the 2008 Obama Presidential Transition Team and led a bipartisan team that provided the president-elect with recommendations on strategic disability-policy issues. She is the author of “Lift Every Voice: Modernizing Disability Policies and Programs to Serve a Diverse Nation,” which was presented to Congress in 1999 by the National Council on Disability. More recently, she served as the project director for a Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission project looking at Medicaid coverage of assistive technology for adult LTSS populations.
Sarah is an internationally known disability activist, having served as executive director of the Silicon Valley Independent Living Center and program director at Access Living of Metropolitan Chicago. She represented the U.S. at the 2012 Asia Pacific Disability Conference in South Korea, represented Centene at the 2022 Harkin International Disability Employment Summit in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and presented at the fifth session of the United Nations Conference of State Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Sarah currently serves as a board member for East Bay Innovations, a nonprofit organization in San Leandro, California, that arranges and provides personalized support that enables individuals with disabilities to live in their own homes, work in jobs of their choosing, and feel a sense of membership in their community.
Sarah earned her bachelor’s degree in history of public policy from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and participated in the joint master’s and doctoral program in disability studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Sarah lives in California with her husband, two children, a dog named Xena Princess Warrior, a horse named Maggie May Belle, and is a proud caregiver for her mother.
