Sounds a bit like a cousin of everyone’s favorite dinosaur – the T-Rex – but there’s nothing extinct about the new T-MSIS or HHS’ transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System. In fact, it’s HHS’ effort to have robust, timely and accurate data to ensure that Medicaid and CHIP achieve the highest standards of program performance by supporting program analysis and improvement, identifying potential fraud or waste, and enabling data-driven decision making.
A week or so ago, CMS issued a State Medicaid director letter with a status report on the upcoming changes to MSIS, which will be known going forward as “Transformed-MSIS or T-MSIS.” The enhanced data from T-MSIS will offer states, CMS and others (does that mean us?) the ability to study and monitor expenditures and enrollment data by beneficiary attributes and different delivery models.
CMS has been working with a dozen pilot states and other stakeholders to refine and enhance the MSIS data set. The agency is currently building the hardware and software to receive, store and analyze data. Later this year, they will be able to accept and test T-MSIS data submissions. States will transition from MSIS to T-MSIS at different points in time, but all states are expected to demonstrate operational readiness and transition to T-MSIS by July 1, 2014.
The new system will reduce the number of reports and data requests that CMS requires of states. CMS intends to use T-MSIS data to derive other reports that states must currently submit, including the Early Periodic Screening, Diagnosis and Treatment (EPSDT) report and the Children Health Insurance Program Annual Reporting Template System (CARTS).
The status of this transformation doesn’t address to what extent such reports will be available publicly. But we hope that a robust reporting mechanism is a big step in the direction of providing consistent, timely reporting of data to all Medicaid and CHIP stakeholders.
[For more on this topic, view the Tech Tuesday blog series by Tricia Brooks or download the CCF-Consumers Union IT Toolkit.]
