Important Message from the Medicaid Director about NewMMIS

Memorandum            

TO:         MassHealth Staff
               MassHealth Provider Community
               Interested Parties
FROM:   Tom Dehner, Medicaid Director

RE:         NewMMIS Project Implementation Date Announcement

DATE:    March 12, 2009

___________________________________________________________________________

I am pleased to announce that MassHealth will be going live with our NewMMIS claims payment system on Tuesday, May 26, 2009.  This is great news for our agency, our partners in the provider community, and, most importantly, our members.  We have traveled a long road to get to this point and there is much work still to be done, but the rewards will be well worth the effort — a state-of-the-art system that will offer our agency enormous flexibility in program design, a wealth of on-line, real-time self-service options for our providers and a smoother operating experience for our members.

We are expending a great deal of effort on implementation readiness activities and these activities will ramp up substantially now that we have a firm implementation date.  If you are a provider, please pay careful attention to our mailings, particularly those pertaining to Provider PIN Registration.  If you have not yet undergone training, I urge you to avail yourself of the multiple opportunities that exist—other states who’ve recently implemented NewMMIS systems tell us that a well-trained provider base is key to avoiding problems and ensuring a smooth implementation.  If you are a MassHealth staffer, you surely are well-aware of what we have been doing to prepare for NewMMIS.  Now is the time to apply an extra level of focus on understanding how your work will change under the new system — each and every one of us at MassHealth is a part of this project.

I know that other implementation dates have come and gone, but barring any last-minute emergency that would necessitate delaying by a few days, May 26 is the day.  We have applied an unprecedented level of rigor to the development and testing of this software and we have a fine-grained view of our current status, our rate of progress and our ability to operate if certain functions are not working exactly as designed.  This is a major systems project and bumps in the road are inevitable, but I believe we are ready to go and prepared to manage the challenges of implementation. 

It is too soon to declare victory, but I want to recognize the phenomenal efforts of the entire NewMMIS project team, under the steady leadership of our project manager, Patricia Wada, and in partnership with EDS, our development vendor.  This is a supremely skilled team that has been working relentlessly for years to bring us to this milestone.  Despite this massive effort, we could never have gotten this far without the expertise of our Secretariat Information Officer, Tom Curran and his talented staff, whose support during the implementation will be instrumental in our anticipated success.  I am also particularly appreciative of the support we’ve received from the Commonwealth’s Chief Information Officer, Anne Margulies, State Comptroller Marty Benison and their respective staffs.  Finally, CMS Associate Regional Administrator Rich McGreal and his team at CMS have provided essential support and advice to keep this project on track. 

MassHealth has a long history of achieving excellent results under difficult conditions, and we intend to do so again with a successful NewMMIS implementation.  When it happens (May 26!), we will have yet another example of what MassHealth, a group of the most talented and dedicated professionals in state government, can do.