2011 Hurricane Irene

Abstract: For Members Impacted by Hurricane Irene - DOH seeks to expedite payments – provider response needed!

Within the next couple of days DOH anticipates releasing a survey to providers impacted by last year’s Hurricane Irene and designed to expedite payment to those facilities that received evacuees.  DOH is asking the associations to communicate with our members and encourage as prompt a turn around on the survey as possible.  The survey will be posted on the Health Commerce System and will also be e-mailed directly to members by each association.  Please note that this survey is only relevant to facilities impacted by Irene; it does not apply to those impacted by Tropical Storm Lee.

At this point, a year after the hurricane, DOH is seeking to find as quick and manageable a process as possible to release funding to receiving facilities.  Their records indicate that the majority of sending facilities have received payment.  Their goal is to survey both sending and receiving facilities for the Medicaid numbers of evacuated residents.  Once these two data sets are correlated, they would then seek to issue payment to the receiving facility.  A second piece of the survey process will ask providers to submit information on any unreimbursed transportation expenses.

Again, in the spirit of expediting this process, DOH is not seeking any information on staffing and is simply seeking to pay a percentage of an average regional Medicaid rate for the days.  They are also not seeking at this time to reconcile payments between sending and receiving facilities, and merely want to ensure that receiving facilities finally receive payment.  The survey will form the basis of the payments and will be outside of the normal claims processing system.  Receiving facilities will not be required to submit any additional claims and this money is not subject to assessment or cost reporting.

DOH has committed to a turn-around of less than one month once the survey is completed.  It is critical that both sending and receiving facilities respond to the survey as quickly as possible so that this matter can be resolved.  LeadingAge NY has never let up on the pressure to get payment issues around both Irene and Lee settled.  Hopefully this represents the final step in the process for releasing Hurricane Irene related payments.

Please look for additional communications on this issue over the next couple of days and contact me with any questions at pcucinelli@leadingageny.org or call 518-867-8827.