Accelify Client Success
July 16, 2014
THE CLIENT: Large School District in Florida
THE PROJECT: Transportation Claiming Services
SITUATION:
Our client, the sixth largest school district in the nation, was working with another vendor to process direct service claims, but this vendor did not have a system for tracking and claiming transportation services for the district’s ~24,000 special education students. This service gap meant millions of dollars of lost potential reimbursement, which left our client anxious to find a solution. Because they did not have any electronic means of capturing ridership information, the solution involved implementing paper transportation tracking logs. These logs were synchronized with the existing routing software to ensure the bus drivers responsible for documenting ridership had accurate logs to minimize their documentation efforts. In addition, the District did not have any staff available to enter data from paper ridership logs.SOLUTION:
Accelify implemented AcceliROUTE to manage ridership data for 900 special education bus routes within 3 weeks of the contract being executed. Members of Accelify’s senior management team immediately met with District staff as well as staff from the District’s routing vendor, Edulog, to develop a solution to meet their needs. During the first three weeks of the project, Accelify’s staff took several steps to implement a solution, including:
Our client, the sixth largest school district in the nation, was working with another vendor to process direct service claims, but this vendor did not have a system for tracking and claiming transportation services for the district’s ~24,000 special education students. This service gap meant millions of dollars of lost potential reimbursement, which left our client anxious to find a solution. Because they did not have any electronic means of capturing ridership information, the solution involved implementing paper transportation tracking logs. These logs were synchronized with the existing routing software to ensure the bus drivers responsible for documenting ridership had accurate logs to minimize their documentation efforts. In addition, the District did not have any staff available to enter data from paper ridership logs.SOLUTION:
Accelify implemented AcceliROUTE to manage ridership data for 900 special education bus routes within 3 weeks of the contract being executed. Members of Accelify’s senior management team immediately met with District staff as well as staff from the District’s routing vendor, Edulog, to develop a solution to meet their needs. During the first three weeks of the project, Accelify’s staff took several steps to implement a solution, including:
- Formalizing a partnership with Edulog to allow direct database access in order to synchronize route information in real time. This allowed the District to produce paper transportation logs with accurate student information, which minimized ridership documentation time. The database synching also allowed Accelify to keep route information up to date in real time.
- Working with the transportation staff at multiple transportation hubs to train them on the use of AcceliROUTE and printing of route logs to distribute to their respective drivers. In addition, through these meetings, Accelify and the District were able to develop a production schedule that ensured accurate timely documentation of ridership information, timely transfer of paper forms to the District’s Medicaid operations staff, and immediate adoption by District bus drivers.
- Meeting with Florida’s Medicaid Agency, the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), to develop AHCA approved scannable route logs that met AHCA’s strict audit requirements concerning transportation documentation. This allowed the District to use the OCR technology from AcceliROUTE to scan and read the relevant ridership data from route logs completed by bus drivers, resulting in a solution with minimal staff impact because there was no need for manual data entry.
- Verifying which special education buses had been specially equipped to service the ridership needs for its Special Education students.
- Verifying and documenting the presence of paraprofessional aides or one-on-one professional nurses for applicable students/routes.
- Ensuring that the district’s IEP system was properly documenting transportation services needs in student IEPs to be able to validate against pre-claim.
- Working with District Medicaid staff to properly match the ridership data coming from AcceliROUTE with the paid FFS claim data. This ensured transportation services were only claimed on days in which a reimbursable FFS service had been as per CMS and AHCA regulations.
- Training District Medicaid and transportation staff on the use of AcceliROUTE and AHCA/CMS Medicaid documentation requirements.
- Customizing AcceliROUTE to meet District needs concerning transportation documentation and audit readiness. This also involved the development of customized business rules for AcceliTRACK to perform set validations pre-claim.
- Development of customized ridership reports that were exportable to allow for easy matching of transportation services to paid health services to ensure proper Medicaid claiming per AHCA regulations.
- Development of additional functionality within AcceliROUTE including time stamps for scanned forms uploaded into the system and confirmation alerts for relevant staff.
RESULTS:
Implemented in October 2011, our client’s transportation reimbursements have increased by over 500% while not having a single claim denied during AHCA’s quarterly monitoring audits. In addition, due the success of the project, our client recently decided to replace its prior Medicaid vendor by awarding Accelify a contract to manage the district’s entire Medicaid program as well as several other custom software development projects.
