What’s happening: DMAS has instructed its contracted managed care organizations (MCOs) to start pre-payment verification of information related to the payment transactions for the Year 3 Medicaid Value-Base Purchasing (VBP) payments that will occur this spring.

• Facilities may receive a request from their assigned MCO to verify certain information to allow for the electronic transactions. For most facilities, the assigned MCO will be the same MCO that was assigned last year; a small number of facilities, however, may experience a change in MCO assignment.

DMAS has asked VHCA-VCAL to alert you that this process is underway and that a prompt response to the request will help to mitigate any unnecessary delays in payment processing once the payment cycle is underway. With all requests for this type of information, due diligence is necessary, but we wanted to inform you that DMAS has directed the MCOs to undertake this process.

As a reminder: Each nursing facility is assigned to one of the MCOs for payment distribution for the two lump sum payments associated with the metric payments. (Fee-for-service providers receive payment direct from DMAS; this is not relevant to those providers).

Questions? Please contact Steve Ford.