[V]ermont Health Connect gave reporters a demonstration of the new case management system on Wednesday, a little more than a week after rolling out the updated system. The new change in circumstance functionality system is designed to solve several problems with the state’s long-troubled health insurance website.
Officials hope the new system will streamline what was previously a cumbersome process for the provider — but a frequent task for any health insurance provider: altering a customer’s personal information in response to qualifying life events such as moving to a new location, divorce, births and income changes.
Cassandra Gekas, planning and policy chief at Vermont Health Connect, spoke to reporters and answered questions about the new system, while two Vermont Health Connect employees demonstrated the difference between the old and new process.
“We started with changes of information, because they’re the simplest things to process,” Gekas said.
The task they demonstrated for reporters – using dummy information so as not to violate customer privacy – was to enter a change of income for a three-person family.
“In the old world, in order to make a change for a Vermonter, you had to withdraw the application … start over from scratch and put it through a multi-step process that could often take weeks or months,” Gekas said.
In the old system, a customer would then receive two separate invoices, Gekas said.
During Wednesday’s demonstration, Thani Totaro, an assistant director at the agency, took roughly 31 minutes to log a change in the old system. (Gekas said that it takes about 45 minutes for the average employee.)
The second run-through, performed on the new system by a business analyst at the agency, took five minutes and six seconds to log the change into the customer’s case, and send it to the insurance company for validation. Gekas estimates the average time for making an application change is 16 minutes in the new system.
About 55 employees have been trained to use the system so far, Gekas said. “As we’re getting rid of the backlog, we should have anywhere between 30 to 40 people working on it per day,” Gekas said.
There were 412 backlog cases processed just in the past week since adding the new system, Gekas said. As of May 27, she said there were 10,200 case requests in the backlog in total. (The agency didn’t have any current numbers at this time.)
The goal is to eliminate the backlog by open enrollment, which is Nov. 1, Gekas said.
There have been a few defects in the system since the June 1 update, which are being addressed, Gekas said.
“Not being a tech person, watching them go through the validation process, feels like crawling around a dark house and going to the bathroom in a hotel room and you bang into the coffee table,” Lawrence Miller, the state’s director of health reform, said. “Once you know where everything is, you can fix it.”
Vermont Health Connect has more work to do on the new system and it is a “methodical process,” to validate all of the bugs, Gekas said.
“It’s like anything – when new software comes out for your smartphone or something, there’s going to be bugs in it, so we’re constantly engaged in that remediation,” Gekas said.
Gekas is confident the differences in the new system will lead to visible improvements.
