The contract, awarded to Maryland-based firm CNSI, is worth more than $28 million and lays out a four-year plan for the work, according to a press release from the company. CNSI has built Medicaid systems in several states, including Michigan, Washington and South Dakota, going back more than a decade.
The project has been years in the making for the state; in 2016 the Texas Medical Association wrote that the process for physicians to enroll in the Medicaid program was fraught with frustrating problems.
“A slow and cumbrous enrollment process frustrates physicians and plans by keeping doctors from getting into the program — and HMO networks — in the first place,” read a paper in Texas Medicine that year. “For instance, Medicaid requires individual physicians and the groups they’re in to enroll separately, and then everyone — including HMOs — must wait on the agency to issue various enrollment identification numbers … before credentialing and claims submission can even begin.”
That year, the Texas HHSC ran an online survey to ask physicians about their experience with the system so they could use the feedback in developing an online portal for enrollment.
The CNSI contract is the realization of that effort. In order to carry out the work, the company said it’s setting up an office in Austin, the state’s capital city.
"Our mission, in the simplest terms, is to improve care delivery and reduce costs for Medicaid beneficiaries in Texas," said CNSI CEO Todd Stottlemyer in the statement. "By modernizing one of the most fundamental aspects of the Medicaid system — the provider enrollment process — we will lift significant administrative burdens from the state's physicians, whose time and attention is so crucial to the successful delivery of care. Doctors, patients, and even taxpayers, will all benefit."
The news comes a few months after Deloitte announced that it had won large contracts to update Medicaid systems in Montana, Ohio, Virginia and Wyoming.
