Early innovator states

[Greenbeard]

Stateline has a nice introduction to the "early innovator" states that are out front designing approaches to the new IT infrastructure that will be supporting health insurance exchanges and state Medicaid programs in a few years. They're meant to be learning laboratories, pioneering multiple paths that other states can follow if they wish.

Aided by the promise of federal help, Kansas has been working on its system for the past year, and officials there say they are ready to begin sharing their technology immediately. That includes specifications for the look and feel of the state’s proposed insurance exchange Web site, and a so-called “logic model” that will dictate how the back end of the system works. Within the next few weeks, Kansas is expected to hire a contractor to do the actual web site design, and plans to share more details at that time.

How were the seven states chosen?

Like Kansas, each of the innovator grant-winning states had a head start in creating the backbone for an insurance exchange. Some were easy choices. Massachusetts, which passed its own statewide universal health care law in 2006, had an exchange, called the Commonwealth Connector, that was already fully operational. HHS offered a grant to the University of Massachusetts Medical School to expand the state’s existing system so that individuals and small businesses in Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont can use it to price-compare and purchase insurance plans in 2014.

Oklahoma had already built an online Medicaid application system that employed instant verification; New York had a state-of-the art Medicaid payment processing and data collection process; and Wisconsin had recently embarked on a new Medicaid information program designed to include the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Plan and other social welfare benefits. Oregon has a project underway that uses off-the-shelf software to create a modular, reusable IT framework aimed at ensuring that low-income consumers do not experience gaps in insurance coverage as their incomes shift.

Slightly longer summaries of each early innovator state's proposal is available here.