Medicaid Council updates: Medicaid enrollment changes

The majority of September’s Medicaid Council meeting focused on massive changes to how people will apply for Medicaid coverage over the next few months. DSS reported that the new ConneCT system is close to caught up on scanning client documents, but work on the indexing system (assigning documents to the right client’s file) continues. Call wait times have increased to average 20 minutes since the new phone system was instituted. There was no information on the rate of dropped calls. DSS is working on technical improvements of the online system to reduce the need for clients and providers to call in. DSS intends to develop a public, online dashboard on how ConneCT is progressing and will update the Council monthly; they are open to ideas on what measures should be included. AccessHealthCT reported on their integrated portal for both exchange and Medicaid applications. After January 1^st all online Medicaid applications (except aged, blind and disabled) must go through the integrated portal. Leadership acknowledged that the system won’t be perfect and there will be mistakes and complaints. They will take paper applications but strongly urge people to apply online. Unfortunately that online application will take about an hour to complete. Data on income levels the system uses will be two years old; they are trying to develop a relationship to use only 6 month old income data. Acknowledging that this is not reliable to accurately determine eligibility, DSS will accept self-reported income and give applicants 90 days to send in supporting documentation. DSS will continue to have to manually enter information in the eligibility system from a pdf generated by the online application for the foreseeable future. There was also a very rich presentation on CHN’s ASO programs and services, but unfortunately there wasn’t sufficient time to explore the information.