The millennium is coming, but will HCFA be ready?
It has been widely reported in the past year that the "Year 2000 Problem" threatens just about all computer users around the world (see story in Hospital Home Health, April 1997, p. 37). Briefly stated, most computer programs, especially those that crunch numbers, were never programmed to handle dates beyond 1999. That is because the computer reads the last two digits of the year. So when the millennium changes, computers won’t know whether it’s 2000 or 1900.
The government has been officially studying the problem for the past 12 months, and it has been discovered that not all agencies of our federal government are up to speed, so to speak. Many are more or less preparing to begin to assess the problem. In the South, that’s called "fixin’ to get ready."
A July report to Congress by the United States General Accounting Office (GAO), titled Time Is Running Out for Federal Agencies to Prepare for the New Millennium (GAO/T-AIMD-97-129), states that the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) just this past May had not "completed numerous critical assessment activities for the systems run by its contractors to process approximately $200 billion annually in Medicare claims."
The report further states that "specifically, HCFA had not required systems contractors to submit year 2000 plans for approval, and lacked contracts or other legal agreements detailing how or when the year 2000 problem would be corrected, or indeed whether contractors would even certify that they would correct the problem."
The report warns, "if systems that millions of Americans have come to rely on for regular benefits malfunction, the ensuing delays could be disastrous."
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