CMS grants to help improve state medical care

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has awarded a second round of Medicaid Transformation Grants totaling nearly $52 million to 16 states and Puerto Rico.

Agencies will use the grants to fund innovative systems that can improve Medicaid's efficiency, cost-effectiveness and quality of care, and get more value out of the money agencies spend providing health care to low-income elderly patients and adults and children with disabilities.

The projects' promised outcomes include reducing diagnosis and prescription error rates through interoperable health information technology; improving collection of revenues; reducing waste, fraud and abuse; increasing the use of generic drugs; improving access to primary and specialty physicians for people without insurance; and improving medication risk management.

Recipients include:

• Oklahoma: $6.15 million for the creation of an online enrollment process.


• Washington: $5.9 million to implement its Second-Generation Fraud and Abuse Detection System.


• Oregon: $5.5 million for the creation of the Health Record Bank of Oregon.


• Pennsylvania: $4.8 million to implement a predictive modeling system for high-risk populations.


• Arizona: $4.4 million to implement a decision support toolbox to increase health care transparency.


• Puerto Rico: $4.27 million to create and utilize electronic data exchanges that can validate demographic and socioeconomic data and help reduce fraud and abuse.


• Georgia: 3.93 million to build a health care quality and cost transparency Web site.


• Rhode Island: $2.77 million for its Medicaid Health Information Exchange Integration Initiative.