Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services CIO expects agency to move claims management systems to the cloud
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ chief information officer expects the agency to move even its most complex health claims management systems to the cloud.
Rajiv Uppal said Tuesday that the Department of Health and Human Services agency has so far moved over 90 of its 200+ IT systems to the cloud and that it is steadily working through other platforms that rely on hosted infrastructure.
“There are some things that are going to take longer to move to the cloud – for example we have claims processing, which is a 40-year-old system that operates on a mainframe,” he said at the AFCEA Bethesda Health IT conference. “If you’re taking individual pieces and moving them to the cloud, that’s just going to take time.”
Uppal added: “Eventually though, I do believe that almost everything [at the agency] will be in the cloud.”
CMS operates a sprawling array of health IT systems, some of which are decades old.
The agency has a budget of nearly $1 trillion and processes over 1.2 billion healthcare claims from citizens receiving Medicare and Medicaid each year.
Uppal added that upskilling staff remains one of his top priorities and said he has a target for at least 50% of CMS Office of Information Technology staff to take courses to improve their skill levels.
Earlier this month, CMS Deputy CIO Bobby Saxon left the agency to take a sales leadership role at federal government contractor Leidos.
