Provider One working

• Published November 07, 2008

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Provider One, a very large, very expensive state computer project, is now operating. There were a few hiccups in phase one, but so far everything has been addressed, according to the Department of Social and Health Services.

The massive project is more than a year behind it's original schedule, but it's paid on delivery, so $88 million has been paid out of $102.3 budgeted for this phase. That’s a 90-10 split between the feds and the state, by the way.

The agency transferred pharmacy payments to the computer on Oct. 20. That’s about $8 million a week in transactions.

Heidi Robbins Brown, Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Health and Recovery Services Administration, said the most serious issue in going live with phase one had to do with over-the-counter medications. The system was refusing payments for some of those drugs that are actually covered by Medicaid.

"That was probably the biggest single issue we had during our cutover. Those kinds of things cause a tremendous volume of calls to our call center," she said.

The department sent word to pharmacies about the problem, and it has been fixed, Robbins Brown added.

What’s next is moving medical payments to the computer some time in 2009, which will up the volume to $75 million in payments per week.