Bi-Weekly Help Desk Call with Municipalities 9/8/2011

Purpose: The purpose of these calls is to provide ongoing communication to the municipalities on key pieces of information related to NYEIS. We receive questions, calls on many of the same topics from users from different municipalities. Broadcasting these frequent questions, communicating the status of new releases allows us to follow-up with all municipalities at once instead of contacting each of the municipalities individually. This improved feedback to the municipalities should also improve call wait time to talk to a Help Desk representative. These calls will be held biweekly and the agenda will be stored on the NYEIS webpage for munis to access if they can’t attend the call.

Agenda Topics

Number Topic Topic Description

1 Review Structure of Meeting

2 Feature We’ve implemented process improvements to provide more Request availability for our Help Desk staff to answer your questions. Process We are now re-directing Feature Requests to not go through the Help Desk and instead go directly to DOH BEI via the HCS secure file transfer. This form will be available beginning Monday 9/12.

3 Data Change We’ve implemented process improvements to provide more Request availability for our Help Desk staff to answer your questions. Process We are now re-directing data change requests to not go through the Help Desk and instead go directly to DOH BEI via the HCS secure file transfer. This form will be available beginning Monday 9/12.

4 Bugs We have implemented several fixes recently, to address issues related to:

1. Ability for Providers to view closed SAs.

2. Ability for Munis from the originating muni to view closed SAs for children that have transferred to another muni

3. Claiming contract error Number Topic Topic Description

4. Corrected Provider Payment File Error

5. Increased Upload File Size from 1.5MB to 15MB – We increased the maximum file size for any individual attachment in a childs case to 15MB.

5 User Administration 1. HCS Account Management – We get a lot of calls from provider users who have established HCS logins but not NYEIS logins. Although a login to HCS is a prerequisite to logging into NYEIS, and although you are not physically logging in with 2 sets of credentials, NYEIS does have its own security. When a user clicks on NYEIS production on HCS, the HCS login credentials are passed thru to NYEIS. If NYEIS does not recognize the user ID, the user will be unable to login. A call to the help desk can confirm the lack of a NYEIS user account, and the help desk can refer the user to the appropriate person that can create the NYEIS user account.

2. User Registration in NYEIS – Municipal Admins, don’t be afraid to call the NYEIS help desk for assistance with creating your first user. It’s easy and fun.

3. User Roles and Access to Work Queues - Access to work queues is managed via user accounts and further controlled by a user’s assigned role

4. Remember: NYEIS logins need to match HCS logins down to the case – Although HCS logins will accept either upper case or lower case format for logging into HCS, NYEIS logins must match their case. This has confused some people who were not aware their HCS login was actually lower case.

Example: your HCS login is hcs123. you can login to HCS using HCS123, and when creating a user account for NYEIS, you convey upper case letters for your HCS login info. You will have trouble logging into NYEIS

6 Provider users 1. Difference between an employee name on an agency vs. provider employee list and a user account for that individual – Number Topic Topic Description

employees in Being able to assign a rendering provider to services in NYEIS NYEIS, and that rendering provider’s ability to login to NYEIS are NOT the same. 2. A provider can be listed as an employee or contractor for multiple agencies, but can have only 1 login (i.e., User Account) – There is only one NYEIS user account per user. Among other things, the provider’s User Account establishes the provider work queues that a user is subscribed to (if their user role includes work queue access) and tasks / activities/ data that the provider has access to. The provider can be associated with an agency or themselves. User Account also establishes the user’s NYEIS user role. Therefore at any point in time, a provider’s user account will only associate the individual with1) a single agency or themselves, but not both, and not multiple agencies, and 2) a single user role. 3. NYEIS logins may not be needed for individuals – If an agency that employs therapists plans to do the data entry/billing on behalf of their therapists, then a NYEIS login may not be needed for those individuals. 4. Service Coordinators and rendering providers should not be associated with an agency in their user account – This is needed so that the SC or RP only sees children assigned to them 7 Notifications – 1. Typically notifications are sent to a child’s EIOD, SC explanation of or all users subscribed to X_work queue – Users broadcast frequently call in asking why they receive notifications for children with whom they have no methodology affiliation. This is because the methodology for and suggestions notifications is to send the notice to all users for managing subscribed to a given work queue. Refer to User Manual Appendix H – Workflows for details. 2. Delete notifications for children you are not involved with, leaving the pertinent notifications – If you don’t stay on top of notifications, it can quickly become difficult to see and manage only the notifications that are important to you. Make it a habit to periodically go through your notifications and delete ones that don’t matter. When you delete a notification, you only delete the copy sent to you and not additional users who may have also received the notification. 3. If message displays that you have reached maximum allowable for space allotted, it is a hint that it is time to clear out older notifications. There Number Topic Topic Description

may be useful notifications waiting to get through – NYEIS can only display a maximum of 100 notifications to a given user. Realize that once this number is hit, there are unseen, potentially relevant notifications waiting to get through. 8 Fiscal Fiscal staff should actively review their fiscal work queues. There are a lot of denied claims or errors from Medicaid that need to be worked. One large Medicaid remittance issue is due to Medicaid currently paying the incorrect rate. This issue has been fixed for new claims, but the older claims will need to be reconciled by the muni. These tasks are in the muni_fiscalMGR work queue. The helpdesk will be sending out detailed instructions on how to resolve these claims.

9 Additional Tips: Search tips

Searching Providers – Always try first on provider’s last name (or state id) only if searching for an individual provider for a user account or if adding an employee – cast a wide net to return any and all likely matches. If you see an identical name with a unique reference number, that is a dupe record and the help desk should be made aware.

Searching Children – Try last name, date of birth, or even just a fraction of the last name in case there is a concern regarding the spelling of child’s name. Often, just searching on the first few letters of the child’s last name or first name will suffice to return the results you are looking for, and/or confirm that the child is not yet registered in the case of new referrals

The pitfalls of an improper search

1. Potential to duplicate records –

The potential to duplicate a provider record is always a concern. If when adding an employee, you do not see an existing record when creating that employee, you create a new provider record via the ‘Create Employee’ tool, however if that provider record was already in existence and simply missed because a thorough search was not conducted, duplicate records can be created. This creates an enormous potential for problems down the road when one attempts to make use of that provider. The same applies for duplicate child records. Number Topic Topic Description

2. Effort to remove –

Once a record is duplicated, only the help desk or sometimes CMA developers can remove the duplicated record, and that requires BEI review and approval. Performing this removal takes time away from other value-added activities. Until removed, working with that duplicated provider can be problematic

Referrals – We typically see 2 major issues with referrals:

1. Please be careful to make sure the referral date is correct – We often field requests to edit referral date. Why? Because the person entering the referral entered the child’s DOB for the referral date. This causes the 45 day clock to be off, considerably.

2. Duplicate referrals – going back to searching for a moment, if processing a new referral you do not see the child was already registered, you have the potential to create a duplicate child record. This creates unnecessary work for the receiving municipality, who then has to assign an EIO/D and ISC just to be able to close case. Duplicate referrals in and of themselves are not really a problem as long as the municipality working the referral correctly associates that referral to an existing child. These simply get logged as an additional referral.

3. Effort to remove is significant and time consuming as mentioned above.