Year 2000 Computing Crisis

The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) has taken comprehensive outreach measures to ensure that Medicare providers will be Year 2000 compliant. For example, earlier this year the HCFA Administrator sent letters to more than 1.1 million Medicare providers urging them to take prompt action on their information and billing systems. Also, HCFA has held a series of Year 2000 conferences throughout the country and has established a toll-free information hotline. Despite these aggressive measures, providers' participation in HCFA's outreach efforts has been low. Furthermore, HCFA has required contractors that process Medicare claims to test with providers using future dated claims. As of June 1999, Medicare contractors' testing with providers had been limited and testing that has occurred had identified problems. Many surveys have been completed this year on the Year 2000 readiness of health care providers by healthcare trade associations and other groups. However, none of the 11 surveys GAO reviewed provided enough information with which to assess the Year 2000 status of the healthcare provider community.

GAO noted that: (1) HCFA has taken comprehensive measures in conducting its outreach activities; (2) for example, the HCFA Administrator sent individual letters to over 1.1 million Medicare providers in January and May of this year, alerting them to take prompt year 2000 action on their information and billing systems; (3) in addition, HCFA held a series of year 2000 conferences throughout the country and has established a toll-free information hotline; (4) despite these aggressive actions, however, HCFA data show that provider participation in its outreach activities has been low; (5) further, HCFA has tasked contractors that process Medicare claims to test with providers using future dated claims; (6) as of June 21, 1999, Medicare contractor testing with providers had been limited and testing that has occurred had identified problems; (7) for example, HCFA reported that one contractor tested with 434 providers and encountered initial problems with 123--9 of which were considered critical failures; (8) many surveys have been completed this year on the year 2000 readiness of healthcare providers by healthcare trade associations and other organizations; (9) however, none of the 11 surveys GAO reviewed provided sufficient information with which to assess the year 2000 status of the healthcare provider community; and (10) each of the surveys had low response rates and several did not address critical questions about testing and contingency planning.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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