SLI’s Medicaid Community of Practice Improves IV&V Results

SILVER SPRING, MD (September 26, 2018) – SLI Government Solutions (SLI) has implemented a Medicaid Community of Practice (CoP) that is helping our clients realize the benefits of other state’s successes and best practices. Our Medicaid CoP convenes monthly to collaborate on various topics such as industry news, CMS guidance provided on our MMIS or E&E Projects, solutions employed, and lessons learned. The Medicaid CoP meetings serve as an open forum to discuss the challenges faced by our staff to successfully support our clients, as well as issues one state is facing that another state has solved. We have developed a Medicaid body of knowledge repository that is updated each month with new topics, CMS guidance, and effective risk and issue mitigation approaches. Our biweekly SLI Certification Round Table sub-group meets to discuss specific MECT and MEET requirements and topics to ensure we implement a consistent approach across states where SLI is providing toolkit and certification checklist support. A primary activity of the sub-group is to formulate questions for CMS about the IV&V Progress Report and Checklist Criteria. SLI houses these questions and CMS’ responses on the internal CoP website, which is accessible to our staff and clients. Below we provide excerpts from this repository. SLI CoP Best Practices

SLI IV&V professionals build the CMS relationship in conjunction with, but independent from, the client.
A detailed IV&V Certification Approach document or IV&V Project Management Plan needs to be created to ensure roles and responsibilities, the certification timeline, and deliverables are defined.
Submitting a narrative version of the IV&V Progress Report as well as the spreadsheet template provides CMS and the Client with an easily consumable version of the status of the project and certification effort.
Periodic IV&V project reviews work best in coordination with milestone reviews and require very close coordination with the development vendor(s), state and management teams.
Information gained from one CMS region must be disseminated to other SLI IV&V project teams. For example, the SLI Mississippi IV&V team shared information gathered on a call with the Central Office, garnering insight on expectations for the IV&V Progress Report. Similarly in South Carolina, SLI’s direct relationship with their CMS region representative afforded them an opportunity to ask questions about the certification process, and the responses the team received were disseminated to the other IV&V project teams.

SLI CoP Lessons Learned

Sharing the same CMS regional representative benefits the IV&V teams with project communication and decision making. The SLI Wyoming and North Dakota IV&V teams leverage information across projects, because they work with the same CMS Regional representative.
Projects at different stages in their lifecycle or a different implementation strategy (single modules vs module cohorts, for example) benefit from hearing about road blocks encountered in other states.

CoP Client Benefits With SLI’s strong Health and Human Services industry presence and our quality partnership with the states we assist, we are able to leverage our team’s and our client’s experiences to benefit not only our state clients but also CMS as it can be assured that their guidance is consistently and fairly applied throughout the country. It also affords us the opportunity to provide feedback to CMS when their guidance varies from region to region or from region to central office. This allows CMS to address internal issues and come up with updated and consistent guidance for the next state, which benefits the entire MMIS community. To find out more about SLI’s CoP and our project oversight/support capabilities, please contact us using the information below.

About SLI Global Solutions

SLI Global Solutions (SLI) is headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, with project locations in over a dozen capital cities across the US. SLI is committed to helping state agencies build quality and innovation into their system implementations and program improvement initiatives. SLI is committed to the use of a standards-based quality management methodology that has been proven effective in a wide range of system implementations and process improvement projects. SLI’s SQM3 methodology is ISO 9001:2015 certified. SLI has experienced staff ready to support your quality and risk management needs on both agile and traditional systems development projects.