Electronic Visit Verification (EVV)

Technical Assistance Call Transcript

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April 20, 2020

[Kiera Bentley] We are still seeing a large number of participants joining, so we will continue to give them a few minutes to join before we begin. For those of you who have just joined, we will just give an additional minute or two for individuals who are still joining the Webex. It looks like the number of participants joining this afternoon has slowed down so I´m going to go forward and start the WebEx today. Thank you everyone for taking the time to join us this afternoon. My name is Kiera Bentley. I am from the Department of Health Office of Health Insurance Programs and I will be facilitating this call this afternoon. I´d like to start by reviewing a few housekeeping items.
Due to the volume of attendees registered for this call, we have placed all attendees on mute throughout the duration of the presentation.
The goal of this call was to quickly give you guys some information specifically on our technical approach. Due to time constraints, we´ve decided that we will not be hosting a live Q and A period today. However, we encourage you to submit questions via EVVhelp@health.ny.gov. The address is provided on the PowerPoint presentation that´s being displayed along with this presentation. We are monitoring this box daily.
Next, I would like to take a second to briefly review the agenda for today´s presentation. As previously mentioned, my name is Kiera Bentley. Lana Earl, the Director of Long-Term Care in the Office of Health Insurance Programs, will be helping us out today by presenting us a welcoming and providing the opening remarks. Daniel Hollenbeck, the New York State Medicaid direct, Medicaid Data Warehouse Director in the Office of Health Insurance Programs, will be providing us with our technical update today.
Finally, I will wrap up the presentation with some next steps and some items for us to look forward to over the next few months to get us going with our EVV implementation. I´d like to hand the call over virtually to Lana Earl, the Director of Long-term Care in the Office of Health Insurance Programs, to start us off with our opening remarks. Lana.

[Lana Earle] Thank you Kiera. Just want to verify that you can hear me?

[Kiera Bentley] Yes, I can hear you.

[Lana Earle] Great, thank you very much. Good afternoon everyone, thank you very much for joining today´s call. We got a large number of participants and I appreciate your time. I also hope that you are all out there well and safe. So, today is the beginning of us focusing on the implementation of the federal electronic visit verification requirements. On behalf of myself, the team here on the call today, as well as the department, we really want to thank all of you for your participation and collaboration over the past many months, as we carefully assess the EVV landscape in terms of working with you all, to get to a proposed solution for implementing the EVV requirements.
We´ve spent time together through the regional listening sessions. Many of you reached out to us separately and in writing to give us your thoughts on how best to proceed. You know following that full-fledged scope of stakeholder regional listening sessions, we also moved forward with a request for information to learn as much as we could about EVV vendor solutions that were out there. And we also summarized for folks the results of what we heard from all of you, and important thoughts in in the regional listening sessions.
And recently, as folks know, we indicated to CMS on April 10th that we would be moving forward with the federal EVV implementation requirements through using a choice model. And we issued that letter I think on the 10th, and that is all been posted to the website and announced through listserv. So, if you have not seen that you can look over the website and take a look. We also did publish the results of our discussions with the vendors through the RFI process. We look forward to turning the page here to begin to work on implementing EVV with you folks. You know the choice model based upon all the information that was provided and carefully considered was, was the one that seemed to best ensure that consumers would have EVV options when they consider selecting a provider. And it gives providers service, the providers who provide the service, flexibility to select an option that would best meet their business needs and the needs of the consumers that they serve. And also was a model that allowed folks to proceed with their resources and time that they have spent in implementing EVV systems that are already in place, and do meet the Cures Act.
So, as you all know and we´ve been talking about collectively for the past several months, the timelines for implementation are January 1st, 2021 for personal care services, and then January 1st, 2023 for home health care services. The January 1, 2021 deadline does reflect the good faith extension that we received a while ago from CMS. And we have not heard any indication from CMS at this stage that that date will be changed. We have certainly flagged for folks that it is a challenging time, but those requirements remain in place and we look forward to working with you all to navigate the implementation processes.
And Dan, I´m going to turn it over to Dan in just a minute, and he will talk a little bit about it more, but the provider solutions will afford EVV providers, excuse me, personal care providers the opportunity to select, implement, and purchase their system. And we will at the state level provide the statewide aggregator solution. So that will be, Dan will speak a little bit more to that, in the upcoming slides. But again, we look forward to working with you and providing assistance through these technical assistance calls and through, the at least initially, through the inbox to answer questions and to provide you folks with assistance.
And to immediately get started we did put out with last week and I think it was, I´m sorry the days are running together for me, but some documentation for EVV providers around program requirements including considerations for selecting an EVV system. And they were all posted at our resource library. So, we hope that you find all of that information helpful, and that as we roll through here with technical assistance calls, we can move together in lockstep to meet the required implementation deadline.
So with that, again thank you for your time today, very much appreciate the work to help the assistance, the collaboration thus far, and we´ll turn it over to Dan Hallenbeck to take you through what we like to share with you today on this initial call for the technical updates. Thank you. Dan.

[Daniel Hallenbeck] Thank you Lana, I really appreciate it. So, for the technical update today we´re going to cover a high-level timeline, submission interface requirements, and submission date details. If we go to the next slide. As you can see from this slide we have a short timeline, and as Lana to mentioned the deadline for implementing the EVV solution hasn´t moved. Including today´s call, we will hold technical collaboration calls to communication requirements and to solicit feedback via the mailbox. Our goal is to finalize the statewide aggregator technical specifications by mid to late May. Once we´ve established the technical specifications, we will begin implementation technical specification calls to assist with any questions you have regarding interfacing with the statewide aggregator. We know that many of you may not have chosen a solution yet, but we recommend that you begin as soon as possible as we are anticipating beginning registration in August, with testing planned to begin in October.
The final date to implement an EVV solution will be December 31st, to meet the January 1st deadline. So, like I was saying, we really have a short amount of time and I also wanted to note that providers should assess all CMS guidelines when setting up, or selecting and setting up their EVV systems. Can we move to the next slide?
To ensure we meet the short timeline, we´ve decided to utilize the existing MMIS eMedNY as a statewide aggregator. We did this after considering the results of the RFI, the listening sessions, in conjunction with discussions with the VOs, that many of you are already using as an EVV solution. To meet the deadline, we have selected in consultation with eMedNY, a RESTful API as an interface. If there is a large demand for SFTP or other interface solution we will consider that for a later release.
The next slide shows the list of data elements we are considering. Technical calls will be used to solicit feedback and moving forward these will be geared to focus on solidification of the technical specs, and assisting in discussions and enabling the integration of the EVV solutions with a statewide aggregator. Interface requirements will be published in an interface control document so that is easy for everyone to see, and understand how to interface with a statewide aggregator, and what data and other technical requirements are needed.
New York State Department of Health is going to continue to evaluate EVV data and technical requirements after January 1st, 2021. We may add requirements at a later date, depending on these evaluations. Can we go to the next slide please, I see you´ve already done that Ok. We arrived at these anticipated data elements based on requirements of the Cures Act, the responses of the RFI, and listening sessions in our discussions with VOs. The data elements are broken down into 7 categories, or sections: The provider agency, a Type of Service being performed, The Individual receiving the Service, The Date and Time of the Service, The location of Service Delivery, The Individual Providing the Service, and Other.
We will continue to receive feedback and refine this list, utilizing the mailbox and these calls until we publish our final interface requirements. Thanks everyone for joining the call and we look forward to working with you and our future technical discussions. Over to you Kiera.

[Kiera Bentley] Thanks Dan. Aman do you mind going a slide forward? Great, so as Lana and Dan had previously mentioned, we do understand that these are challenging times for folks and we really do appreciate you guys taking the time to join us this afternoon. We have several next steps and things that we want you to look forward to over the next couple of months. First and foremost, please continue to monitor the EVV website, and for upcoming details that will be posted. Specifically, those technical specifications that were previously mentioned by Dan. We´d like you to, we´d like to encourage you to continue to register and attend these technical assistance calls. As we get farther into these technical assistance calls, we do plan on providing further details. We appreciate if you register in advance for these calls. We will be hosting them on a biweekly basis, and we plan on posting a schedule to the EVV website shortly. This PowerPoint presentation will be provided via the EVV website after this call today. So, if you´re looking for any of the links that you saw that were brought up during the presentation, you´ll be able to refer to those links from this presentation that´s posted on the EVV website. Specifically, the last page of this presentation includes a link to the listserv. So, we would encourage you to sign up for the listserv if you are not already signed up for the listserv. As previously mentioned, I know we didn´t have the opportunity to have a live Q and A today. We do plan on having a live Q and A in subsequent calls. However, we encourage you to submit questions and inquiries to the EVVhelp@health.ny.gov.
Our plan is to monitor this box frequently and post FAQs in response to the questions submitted on the EVV website and via, oh I´m sorry, so we´re going to post FAQs in response to the questions that you are submitting. We´ll post those FAQs via the website and will notify you that those FAQs have been posted via the listserv. One of the things that we plan on doing by next week, which is the last week of April, is we plan on distributing a survey to a provider to assist the provider EVV capabilities. And to also find out if providers would be interested in engaging in Pilot testing with us. We thank you in advance for your responses to those surveys and encourage you to be on the lookout for that.
As previously mentioned, we will be scheduling out technical assistance calls on a biweekly basis. And that is all the new information that I believe we have for everyone today. As Lana mentioned, there are a lot of resources that are posted to the New York State Department of Health EVV website. If anybody did not have an opportunity to review the information that was posted last week, we encourage you to do so. We also encourage you to sign up for the EVV listserv and look for a future notifications from us and spend any questions that you may have to evvhelp@health.ny.gov.
We thank everybody for your time today we saw a lot of participants were able to join us and we are very thankful for that. We hope that everybody stays safe during this time.

[Lana Earle] Hey Kiera, it´s Lana, why don´t we leave this slide up for a few minutes in case folks want to write down any of the information here before we just close out the webinar.

[Kiera Bentley] Sounds like a great idea thank you, and we will also make these slides available on the EVV website.

[Lana Earle] And the EVV website is the last address on the page here that folks might be viewing.

[Kiera Bentley] Correct, thank you.

[Lana Earle] Thank you everybody, stay safe, we appreciate the touch base today and more to come. Have a good afternoon.