Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to Move Claims Management to the Cloud, Expects CIO

The chief information officer of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expects the agency to move even its most complicated health management system to the cloud.

So far, the Department of Health and Human Services has moved 90 of the 200+ IT systems to the cloud and that is steadily working through other platforms that depend on hosted infrastructure.

“In fact, some things will take time to move to the cloud, for example, the agency has claims processing, which is a 40-year-old system that operates on a mainframe, stated the executive at AFCEA Bethesda Health IT Conference. If individual pieces are moved to the cloud, it will take time.”

Eventually, almost everything at the agency will be in the cloud, opines the executive.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid operates an extensive array of health IT systems, some of which are decades old.

The agency processes over 1.2 billion healthcare claims from individuals receiving Medicaid and Medicare each year with a budget of nearly US$ 1 trillion.

Meanwhile, upskilling staff remains one of the top priorities with a target of at least 50% of staff of the Office of Information Technology of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid to take courses to improve their skill levels.

Earlier in the month, Deputy Chief Information Office at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid left the organization to take a sales leadership position at federal government contractor Leidos.