When the world turns upside down

Speaker 1:

When the world turns upside down: Moving procurement and implementation forward during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Diane Evenson:

When COVID-19 hit, both of your states had implementations going on.

Speaker 1:

In a wide-ranging webinar, Diane Evenson, Vice President and Senior Client Executive at Optum led a discussion with Melissa Kmiecik from the Tennessee Office of eHealth and Jason Hetherington from MassHealth in the State of Massachusetts, talking first about the immediate reaction and the challenges of conducting business when people could no longer go into the office.

Jason Hetherington:

We were one of the states hit first and hit hardest with COVID-19, so the office closings came very fast. We hadn't been prepared to put our whole workforce out remote. Our business partner, Optum's our systems integrator for our eligibility system. We suspended our change request process with them for those operational requests, so that we could say, "Listen, normally we go through a change request process. Normally we vet these things in more detail and we implement at a more measured pace. We're going to suspend those processes. We're going to jump over all of that."

Speaker 1:

In addition to talking about the success and struggles that COVID-19 created, Melissa and Jason also talked about their work moving forward and how, what they have learned can influence how they react to future events.

Melissa Kmiecik:

One of the things that we learned was when we onboard a new vendor, sometimes there's that... it's like any relationship. It can maybe take six months till you get comfortable with who each other is and what roles you're going to perform? How do you work? How's the best way to communicate? I think we took the approach that you just have to jump right in and trust immediately.

Jason Hetherington:

And teams are very resilient. Folks are very resilient. If you ask them to change, they will. If they have a real reason to do something differently, they'll do it. If they have to make adaptations in their personal life, to work in a different way, they'll do it. I've been incredibly impressed.

Melissa Kmiecik:

And Heaven forbid we ever go through something like this again, we're already trying to think about what would we want to kick off? What would we want to document as, "okay, these are all these things, and these are all the constituents and stakeholders that we need to tie out in order to keep these things going." So it's a different way to look at disaster recovery and business continuity as well.

Speaker 1:

They also shared advice for future implementations.

Jason Hetherington:

Testing the systems that support your continuity of operations plan and testing them at full scale, I think is critical.

Melissa Kmiecik:

At the end of the day, you want to be prepared. You want to be flexible. You want to be nimble. You want to be very positive and creative. And those are the keys that we've applied here. And I think that that served us well.

Jason Hetherington:

We always talk in a project about how important it is to have clear documentation, clear requirements, a clear SDLC. Those things are much more important I think remotely. But stronger processes will help you, better documentation will help you. If you have those things in place, you can do this. This can be surprisingly successful.