$1.3 Billion in State Integrated Eligibility Spending by FY09.
Input: State spending driven by need to improve efficiencies and contain costs. An estimated $1.3 billion will be spent by states to bring integrated eligibility services to the Web for use by state and county workers as well as citizens. The upturn will be driven by new administrations looking to capture savings and make their marks in terms of improving citizen service.
After a short dip in enthusiasm for integrated eligibility projects, states will show renewed interest in these projects between now and fiscal year 2009 (FY09). States that didn’t have projects well underway before 2006 likely chose to take a wait-and-see attitude. However, with Medicaid spending eating up budget surpluses and case loads rising, every state will be forced to consider this option.
State integrated eligibility projects are intended to capture new efficiencies by tying together multiple health care and social services programs, such as Medicaid, food stamps, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), and the state children’s health insurance programs (SCHIP), into a single Web-enabled interface. This creates savings by eliminating duplicative and labor-intensive processes as well as errors that occur as a result of using paper forms, legacy interfaces, and requiring citizens to seek enrollment for each program separately. These projects have intensive requirements for service oriented architecture (SOA) consulting services as well as adept vendors of XML-based middleware for health care and social services.
Recent controversies surrounding big bang projects like the $800 million Texas Integrated Eligibility Redesign System (TIERS) will drive states toward more iterative approaches to integrated eligibility. Everyone looked past the low-key, successful implementations in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts a few years ago and got excited about the potentially huge short-term returns of a project like TIERS. The next wave of projects will follow the more patient example of states like Utah, New York, and North Carolina, which are taking phased approaches that minimize the risk of service disruptions upon rollout of the new interface.
posted by Ingemar Lindmark at 9:50 AM
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