CMS awards more Medicaid Transformation Grants
Sixteen states and Puerto Rico get funds to modernize the delivery and administration of Medicaid health services.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has awarded a second round of Medicaid Transformation Grants totaling nearly $52 million to 16 states and Puerto Rico.Agencies will use the grants to fund innovative systems that can improve Medicaids efficiency, cost-effectiveness and quality of care, and get more value out of the money agencies spend providing health care to low-income elderly patients and adults and children with disabilities.The projects promised outcomes include reducing diagnosis and prescription error rates through interoperable health information technology; improving collection of revenues; reducing waste, fraud and abuse; increasing the use of generic drugs; improving access to primary and specialty physicians for people without insurance; and improving medication risk management.Recipients include: Smaller grants went to Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin.The special grants, funded by Congress as part of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, require no matching funds from the states. The first round of grants, awarded last January, provided $98 million to 26 states.
- Oklahoma: $6.15 million for the creation of an online enrollment process.
- Washington: $5.9 million to implement its Second-Generation Fraud and Abuse Detection System.
- Oregon: $5.5 million for the creation of the Health Record Bank of Oregon.
- Pennsylvania: $4.8 million to implement a predictive modeling system for high-risk populations.
- Arizona: $4.4 million to implement a decision support toolbox to increase health care transparency.
- Puerto Rico: $4.27 million to create and utilize electronic data exchanges that can validate demographic and socioeconomic data and help reduce fraud and abuse.
- Georgia: 3.93 million to build a health care quality and cost transparency Web site.
- Rhode Island: $2.77 million for its Medicaid Health Information Exchange Integration Initiative.