Columbus Day Assignment

In this picture, we see Christopher Columbus making an appeal to Queen Isabella for her support of his plan to open a trading route with Asia through a West Indies passage. To accomplish this feat, Columbus would need to chart a new path, through unknown and untested waters. Columbus was a visionary.

At the end of the last century, the Medicaid systems realm was the beneficiary of a gathering of visionaries within the Private Sector Technical Group (PS-TG). When I saw this picture, I thought of Arthur McKay and Susan Fox putting the finishing touches on a document that would lay the foundation for MITA. The document is titled


Steps Needed to Improve State Medicaid Information Systems (MMIS):
The Private Sector View of Challenges and Opportunities for the 21st Century
The severity of the demands pressuring the present day MMIS prompted the PS-TG to publish this paper as a way of contributing to the change process. Within this document, the PS-TG addressed the following issues:

1) Impact of expansion of managed care; introduction of Welfare Reform; expansion of waivers and carve-outs

2) Changes in the healthcare delivery system with expansion of and experimentation with new arrangements, e.g., PHOs, MCOs, IPAs, MSOs

3) Political pressures to privatize, thin the ranks of state employees, carve out services

4) Technological explosions in communications, electronic media, information highway, hardware

5) Reduction in the ranks of traditional MMIS contractors; increase in numbers of new specialty service vendors

6) Increase in experimentation leading to project failures, delays, overruns, and disputes

7) Break up of the traditional MMIS into component parts

If you haven’t read this document, I urge you to do so - Make it your Columbus Day homework assignment.

http://www.pstg.org/21centmmis.htm#Section%209:%20Next%20Steps