IT director for HCFA promises agency can meet Y2K deadline
By DON LONG
HHBR Staff Writer
Healthcare is the biggest business in the United States, and the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA; Baltimore, MD) administers the largest payment of funds in U.S. healthcare nearly 30% of the total via Medicare and Medicaid payouts, consisting of 900 million claims per year.
And in almost every report of federal agencies attempting to reach Y2K compliance, HCFA has gotten the lowest marks, with Congress, other governmental agencies (including the General Accounting Office), and the media taking turns at hammering the agency for being the slowest to meet its own Y2K deadlines.
In the most recent example, the journal Government Executive, in its February report card on several federal agencies, gave HCFA an overall C, including a grade of D in the information technology/capital management column, saying the agency was "weighted down by antiquated, disparate systems and a late start on Y2K."
Not to worry, says Joseph Broseker, IT director for HCFA and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Washington). "Actually, we’re in real good shape," Broseker told attendees at a one-day Y2K conference held recently in Nashville, TN. The conference was sponsored by the Rx2000 Solutions Institute (Minneapolis).
Broseker did acknowledge that the agency had hit some major speed bumps which had slowed its Year 2000 compliance effort in a major way. But HCFA is playing catch up and will succeed in fulfilling its own timetable, which calls for compliance of all systems by next month, he promised.
The slow start on the problem resulted from the agency’s failure to achieve transition to the proposed Medicare Transaction System, which would have accomplished much-needed overall modernization while being entirely Y2K compliant, Broseker said.
That transition, however, was hit with delays and cost overruns. The result: after three years and about $800 million in expenditures, the project was scrapped, with the agency instead having to perform a major facelift of its legacy systems as part of the Y2K compliance effort.
That’s a complex task, according to Broseker’s description. Besides requiring the reprogramming of 50 million lines of computer code, it involves nearly 100 systems he described as "mission critical," 25 internally operated systems, and 75 external systems operated by 400 "data exchange partners" responsible for the bulk of the agency’s claims processing.
And among those external systems, six operate as backbones providing the infrastructure primarily hardware to operate and test the other systems, according to Broseker.
Those infrastructure backbones will soon be up to speed, making it possible to put all the other systems into full operation by the agency’s March deadline, Broseker predicted. To test those systems, he said that a "mirror image" of them has been created to replicate next year’s environment. This parallel system will then be run to validate that Medicare and Medicaid payments will indeed continue smoothly after the clock hits midnight on Dec. 31. Broseker estimated that, besides working with its internal systems and the 400 data exchange partners, programmers had to make compliant up to 30 data processing units and "hundreds of off-the-shelf products." The effort has also served to put off or entirely cancel other needed programs planned for the agency and has come at considerable cost at least $200 million over the past two years, he said.
Combining both direct and indirect costs, Broseker called the Y2K effort "the largest single expense ever since the beginning of the HCFA program."
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