The clock is ticking, and it’s a big clock.
When the state eliminated adult day health care as a Medi-Cal benefit, the state Department of Health Care Services announced it would do a complete health risk assessment of all ADHC patients to better determine what their health needs are.
Filling those needs will be a huge chore, but conducting the assessments is big enough all by itself.
Assessments started on Oct. 1, and there is a 45-day deadline in place. That means all 35,000 assessments need to be completed by Nov. 15.
That’s more than 5,000 completed assessments every week — or 778 every day, seven days a week.
“It is an enormous effort,” Norman Williams of DHCS said. “But this is being done to ensure that the transition plan works, and that we meet the needs of this population.”
During the first week of the assessment project, some patient data were not available, according to Williams. The company doing most of the assessments is APS, Inc., a care management contractor, and Williams said they added about 100 additional workers for this project.
The grand total at the end of the second week was: 5,463 contacts initiated (generally, a phone call placed) and 1,277 assessments completed.
That means there’s a long way to go, with almost 34,000 assessments still needing to be completed. But those numbers reflect a process that hasn’t yet hit its stride, Williams said.
“There has been a significant increase in speed since the health risk assessments began,” Williams said. “We have a really big call center. It has really picked up in the last week.”
Williams expects updated numbers to come in this week. He said those numbers will be bigger. “We’re satisfied it’s something APS can handle, and do well,” Williams said.
Of the completed APS assessments, he said, 563 were done in person, and 299 were completed by phone.