Health Connector chips away at backlog
Hampered by a malfunctioning website, the Massachusetts Health Connector has enrolled about 15,000 people over the last week, chiseling away at a backlog of people seeking coverage.
The current backlog is significantly smaller than the original 50,000 paper application backlog of the week of Feb. 10, Sarah Iselin, a special consultant working on the problem, said in a weekly briefing Friday. The number of paper applications not yet screened is 34,000. Twenty-eight thousand have been screened, 4,000 applications have been identified as duplicates, and 15,000 were found to already have coverage.
The Connector is prioritizing data entry for the remaining 9,000 applicants who were screened and found to be without coverage.
"This is significant progress," Iselin said. "It’s keeping us pointed in the right direction."
The Connector has processed all of the applications that were entered through the website, according to a one-page briefing sheet. All of the 22,000 applications that had been entered into the website system have been processed, and Connector workers found about 7,100 already had coverage and 14,900 were granted provisional coverage.
Health and Human Services Secretary John Polanowicz told reporters outside a Cabinet meeting he expects to receive information on the security of the Connector website within a few days. The company, Optum, is providing data entry and paper application processing resources to the state. The 200 Optum employees will ramp up to 300 over the next two week.
Also on Friday, Gov. Deval Patrick suggested officials need to determine if the website is "salvageable" or if the state should "push the reset button."
"I hope we’ll have an answer to that really big central question," Patrick said during an "Ask the Governor" segment on Boston Public Radio.
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