State launches new application system online
TennCare quietly launched an exceptionally expensive and longoverdue Medicaid application system over the weekend, potentially transforming how some of Tennessee’s most vulnerable residents obtain medical coverage and other benefits.
Officials confirmed the TennCare Connect system, designed to quickly process applications online or by phone, went live Saturday morning. The system, which has been federally mandated since 2014, is built on a computer infrastructure that cost about $400 million, mostly covered by the federal government.
TennCare officials were coy about the launch of the new system as recently
as Friday, refusing to say when it would function statewide. TennCare Director Gabe Roberts said much of the new system has worked behind the scenes for months and the final milestone was to roll out the TennCare Connect web portal to the entire state.
But officials worried they risked a technological collapse — not unlike what happened in initial days of Obamacare — if the web portal fully launched before it was ready.
“We’ve got this huge amount of time, and this huge amount of money invested in this system,” Roberts said. “Even though [the web portal] is a relatively small part of the overall system, it’s overwhelmingly the part people are going to see.”
TennCare Connect consists largely of three major components: The web portal, which can be used for online applications; a call center, which handles applications over the phone; and an internal computer system — the Tennessee Eligibility Determination System, or TEDS — which officials call the “brain” of the new application system.
Both the web portal and the call center use TEDS to determine if applicants are eligible for TennCare or the social services by analyzing a complicated mix of income and medical variables. TEDS automatically interfaces with more than 100 outside sources, including the IRS and the Social Security Administration, to verify information from applicants, said Hugh Hale, TennCare’s chief information officer.
“We’ve been working on this for years, and there have been 100 people in a room testing this since last April,” Hale said. “We may have one chance to give a great first impression. And we are going to be testing until the day — up until the second — we press the button.”
Previously, most applications for TennCare were processed by the federal government, which took on responsibility for applications with the passage of the Affordable Care Act but mandated that states create modernized application systems of their own.
Historically, most TennCare applications were processed by mail or in person, but the process was slow and difficult to use, especially for poor and rural residents who were most likely to need TennCare in the first place. TennCare was forced into the digital age with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, known as ObamaCare, which began processing online applications on the state’s behalf but mandated Tennessee to modernize its own application system.
Modernization has not been quick, and it has not been cheap. TennCare contracted Northrop Grumman, a military technology company, to build TEDS in 2012, then fired the company when the work was never completed. A new company, Deloitte Consulting, was hired on a five-year contract to finish the job in 2016.
“We’ve already been down the road once and had a false start,” Roberts said Friday, still uncertain when TennCare Connect would actually launch. “What we care about is make sure we are doing this right by the people we are serving and by the taxpayers. We want to make sure the system works, and works as designed, and when the system works as designed, it will be launched.”