Healthcare Technology Featured Article

June 01, 2012

Accenture to Help D.C. Set Up System to Provide Health Insurance and Care to More People


Businesses have always been one of the first to adopt new technology to make processes easier and reduce costs. But now the government is doing it, too, where, in the District of Columbia, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company has been chosen to improve residents’ access to quality healthcare while ensuring compliance with federal mandates and health insurance exchange deadlines, according to a company press release.

Accenture is the company, and the plan and system requirements fall under the authority of the District's Healthcare Reform Implementation Committee.

Accenture will work with the District on changing Medicaid eligibility processes, and creating new self-service tools and capabilities, and a health benefits exchange to open access to affordable health insurance, according to the press release.

In addition, improved federal funding will allow the District to set up a new integrated eligibility system, which will be deployed in later releases.

By pulling Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), and the D.C. Healthcare Alliance, the District of Columbia reported in 2008 that it covered 192,026 people, almost all of whom otherwise would lack health insurance, and by extension, health care.

Medicare covered about 73,000 D.C. residents, or about 13 percent of the population, four years ago, while Medicaid supported almost 145,000 residents, according to the D.C. Department of Health Care Finance.

People without insurance often do not seek health care until much later, when an illness may be more serious, and costly to treat. That’s why the Affordable Care Act has mandated that all U.S. citizens be covered by health insurance within the next few years. 

Once Accenture has delivered the blueprint and system requirements to the District, the press release reports that the District will ultimately select an integration vendor to support design, build, test and deploy the system.

According to the press release, the District is focusing on complete service integration across health and human services. Federal matching funds (90 percent federal/10 percent state) will allow the District to finance development of new eligibility systems, replacing its aging mainframe-based system with an integrated solution, enhancing city-wide integration of services.

"This plan will guide the District's ultimate replacement of a legacy system with a modern solution that enables district-wide case management and real-time functionality," said Julie Booth, Accenture's human services North American managing director for state, provincial and local government, in the press release. "The District is wisely moving to an IT approach that allows for more data-sharing, uses innovative technology and is more easily updated and scaled for growth through configuration rather than coding."




Edited by Brooke Neuman
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