Andrew Slavitt
See the following -
Officials Spent Just Two Weeks Testing HealthCare.gov Prior To Launching It
Contractors that helped develop the Obama Administration’s troubled online health insurance marketplace HealthCare.gov told lawmakers on Thursday they wish they’d had more time to test the site before launch but denied any ongoing problems with their portions of the site. Read More »
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Andrew Slavitt and the Opportunity Offered by Open Medicaid IT
As we reported in the December 15 issue of OpenMedicaidIT News, Andrew Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, has openly discussed the opportunity offered by CMS' open Medicaid IT strategy in multiple blog posts and meetings. We have reported on this opportunity in an article titled CMS To Invest $5+ Billion a Year in Open Source and Cloud-based IT Infrastructure for Medicaid and recently started a newsletter provide our readers with news of the opportunities for tech companies as they emerge. We reprint here the article from the newsletter presenting that opportunity in Slavitt’s own words.
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CMS Supports Open Source/Modular Medicaid Information Technology
Investing in the future of Medicaid is one of the single biggest opportunities in the health care sector...Overall, CMS’ annual investment in state Medicaid Information Technology (IT) is more than $5 billion, enabling states to modernize their Medicaid IT systems to best meet their program, providers’ and beneficiaries’ needs. CMS and states are prepared to invest in innovative solutions. For this investment, we expect significant advances. Our new regulations require that states evolve their legacy Medicaid IT systems to leverage reusable solutions, and to practice industry-proven IT methods such as use of modularity, reuse, shared services (including Software-as-a-Service) by fundamentally shifting the financial incentives away from custom development. This opens opportunity to smaller vendors to develop focused solutions for use across multiple states or to introduce solutions from comparable sectors such as commercial insurance or large provider systems.
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CMS To Invest $5+ Billion a Year in Open Source and Cloud-based IT Infrastructure for Medicaid
After more than 40 years of relying on monolithic mainframe platforms to administer its services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has embraced a new modular, open and agile approach to Medicaid health information technology for the Federal government and States. In many ways, this is the best of what open source advocates and technology innovators could have hoped for when it comes to open source policy from a government agency. According to Andrew Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, the agency will spend more than $5 billion a year to fund this transformation.
Is The 1.5+ Trillion Dollar HITECH Act a Failure?
Hopefully, the public statements made by President Obama and Vice President Biden will lead to a public debate over the monumental problems that the HITECH Act and proprietary EHR vendors have caused the American people. While the press continues to report the figure of $35 billion as the cost of implementing EHRs, that figure does not tell the entire story. Perhaps the next step is to provide accountability and transparency. That would start with firm numbers regarding the real costs of EHR implementations forced on an unprepared healthcare system by the HITECH Act.
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Is the Technology Gap the Reason Why Medical Errors are the 3rd Leading Cause of Death in the US?
Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of an information technology (IT) mess in the United States that seems like an endless round of the old radio show joke contest, “Can You Top This” except that increasingly the joke is on us. From nuclear weapons updated with floppy disks, to critical financial systems in the Department of the Treasury that run on assembler language code (a computer language initially used in the 1950s and typically tied to the hardware for which it was developed), to medical systems that cannot exchange patient records leading to a large number of needless deaths from medical errors.
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Obama and Biden Blast EHR Vendors for Data Blocking
As they are winding their terms in office, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden dropped a stink bomb on the health IT industry. Speaking at different events on Friday, January 9th, the President and Vice President both criticized proprietary electronic health record (EHR) vendors as the primary obstacle to the success of their administration’s health care strategy. This is the highest level acknowledgment so far of the serious impact that “lock-in” EHR software vendors are having on America’s medical infrastructure and the ability of physicians to provide medical care.
Pitching Medicaid IT in Silicon Valley
Earlier this year, I announced a new effort to connect new, innovative companies and their investors to the state Medicaid program IT space. Since this announcement, I have been encouraged by the initial interest from companies that may not have otherwise ever thought about participating in this important health insurance program that covers more than 72 million Americans. That’s why I’m in Silicon Valley today to participate in a forum on bringing technological advances to Medicaid. The forum is convening states, innovative tech companies, and federal Medicaid officials on how to collaborate to improve the delivery of Medicaid health coverage in states.
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