The Mississippi Legislative Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Committee has released its report entitled: A Review of the Division of Medicaid’s Non-Emergency Transportation Program.
The PEER Committee concluded that the Division of Medicaid (DOM) has an opportunity to further improve its cost-efficiency of the non-emergency transportation (NET) program by factoring the weight of costs for non-utilizing NET beneficiaries into its next procurement. PEER says DOM should consider revising the scoring process in factoring in implementation costs to eliminate potential bias towards the existing NET broker.
DOM should improve its oversight of the NET program by becoming less dependent on self-reported data from the NET broker, the review states, establishing standard operating procedures for auditing, assessing liquidated damages on a routine basis, and improving the beneficiary satisfaction survey processes.
The review was mandated as part of Senate Bill 2836 during the 2018 regular session. The review for that year was due by January 1, 2019, and was scheduled to be repeated every two years. This is PEER’s second review of NET under this law.
The NET program is a non-emergency transportation program that is administered by the Devision of Medicaid. It provides rides to and from scheduled Medicaid-enrolled provider appointments. This program is mandatory for any state per federal regulations.
The current private contractor used by Medicaid for NET is Medical Transportation Management Inc (MTM). They have served as the broker since 2013. According to the review, there are a total of 5,925 NET utilizers per month and an average of 107,251 NET non-utilizers a month. Since the contract began in February of 2019 the program has provided 885,983 rides with an average monthly ride total of 49,221.
The review recommended that the DOM should consider revising the scoring process in determining how it factors in the implementation cost component of the overall NET bid proposals for future NET broker procurements. Further, considering that approximately 88.7% of the total actual NET costs through the initial 17 months of the current NET contract covered payments for non-utilizing NET beneficiaries, DOM should consider the weight of the cost of non-utilizers per month in any proposals or bids in future NET procurements.
You can view the full report HERE:
A Review of the Division of Medicaid’s Non-Emergency Transportation Program by yallpolitics on Scribd
Sarah Ulmer
