Why is MITA so necessary?
Friedman: For the past 30 years, Medicaid agencies and states had their own systems, usually handled by different contractors. These systems are homegrown from the bottom up because the policies in each state for Medicaid — ranging from eligibility, benefits, reimbursement rates, and waivers — vary from state to state. The IT systems reflect that diversity. The difficulty is that these systems cannot share data easily across organizational silos, within states, or from state to state. So MITA is a transformational change. It is CMS’ effort to try to transform the transaction-based, claims-focused, point-to-point systems into a service-orientated architecture based that is based on business processes that are common to all states, and affords sharing across organizational boundaries. DHP: How is the transition from the old state Medicaid Management Information Systems (MMIS) to MITA going? Friedman: We are probably halfway through, in terms of the design of MITA and only 1/5 way throu
