From: Ellie Fitzjarrald, Director and Mary Riggen, Chief, Program Integrity and Analysis
Our awesome salmon from FY 2009 are approaching their goal and have the wide open ocean sparkling up ahead. With 10 of 12 months of payment accuracy data available (October through July) our salmon are navigating with a “school” (statewide) average of 95.6%. What’s especially impressive is that there were no reportable payment errors in the months of May and July!
Our 2009 SNAP challenge was for all salmon fry to successfully make it out to sea at 95% payment accuracy or better, and we now have 5 salmon exceeding the 95% target (Southeast, Fairbanks, Kenai, Mat-Su and Muldoon). All of the salmon are doing very well, swimming along with the school and with none lagging far behind!
Our 95.6% accuracy rate moves us up in the national ranking to 40th place. We may be as high as 32nd place when the 10 month national rankings are available, since we had no countable errors for July. Our negative case accuracy rate of 92.9% may jockey us into 33rd place when the 10 month national rankings are available.
And as if this awesome performance wasn’t enough, we just learned that our FY 2008 Medicaid accuracy performance was exceptional! The national Medicaid eligibility estimated error rate for Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM) was 6.74%. Alaska’s eligibility payment error rate was 0.12%. The national combined Medicaid estimated error rate (for the eligibility and provider claims reviews) was 8.71%. Alaska’s combined error rate was 0.59%. Alaska had the highest accuracy of the 17 states conducting Medicaid PERM reviews in FY 2008.
Alaska’s PERM Error Rate Relative to Other FY 2008 States and the National Error Rate
So as we swim through the holidays, take a moment to acknowledge yourself and your team for the awesome work you are doing in a sea of complexity.
“H2O: two parts Heart and one part Obsession.”