9:00am- Secretary begins to research why students are not being identified as Medicaid eligible.
9:05am- A parent calls asking to speak with the director.
9:10am- Secretary gets back to the eligibility issue and pulls up the list of eligible kids. She is able to put in 15 minutes of logging into the state system and collect current status information. Phone rings and a case manager is asking for an IEP document from a student file. The document is missing and then a trail of phone calls and emails go out to find this particular document that has some level of importance.
11:12am- The secretary can only now get back to the eligibility issue but the phone is ringing off of the hook and the secretary is only able to work on Medicaid eligibility in small chunks of time. Therefore, the eligibility effort often requires the secretary to retrace her steps multiple times to pick up where she left off…
School-based Medicaid billing is a multi-facetted process and without a structured routine it can be overwhelming. These overwhelming and unsolved issues become a common practice when a district Medicaid coordinator is also a secretary, or clerk for another job, separate from Medicaid billing. I have personally witnessed these hard-working coordinators trying to manage special education tasks while simultaneously trouble shooting Medicaid billing issues. The end result is the Medicaid issues are not resolved or fully vetted and the source of the problem continues.
In the above example, what was accomplished towards identifying the Medicaid eligibility problems? Not much, and certainly nothing of value was determined, because there were too many complicated tasks to be resolved at the same time. Multitasking is often touted as an efficient way of accomplishing items, however, research shows that humans are typically good at balancing tasks that use unrelated mental and physical resources. For instance, most people are able to fold laundry and listen to a weather report on the radio without too much trouble. Tasks that require more complex thinking will lead to mistakes being made.
From an article on multitasking in LiveScience… “Dividing attention across multiple activities is taxing on the brain, and can often come at the expense of real productivity,” said Arthur Markman, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. "There's a small number of people who are decent multitaskers, but at best, it's maybe 10 percent of the population, so chances are, you're not one of them. The research out there will tell you that there are a couple of people who are good at it, but it's probably not you."
The Solution for Medicaid billing: Blocks of uninterrupted time and established routines.
In the case of the secretary above, if she has 3 hour blocks of time once or twice a week, solely devoted to Medicaid billing, complex issues will be clearly identified and options for solving them can be pursued regularly. This leads to maximizing reimbursements, which will make her supervisors happy. Secondly, establishing a routine and a pattern of activities alerts office mates when the Medicaid coordinator is available to address issues other than Medicaid items.
4 suggestions on how to streamline the Medicaid management process
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