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By David Hamilton, theWHIR.com
September 4, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The US federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (cms.hhs.gov) has awarded health care insurance application systems provider Companion Data Services (companiondataservices.com) a four-year contract to provide data center services to handle Medicare claims processing in four states.
According to CDS's announcement Thursday, its Medicare Enterprise Data Center in Columbia, South Carolina will house data processing and hosting operations for an estimated 140 million Medicare claims per year submitted by health care providers in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky.
CMS had chosen CDS for similar claims processing work in 30 other states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The new addition will make CDS's share of fee-for-service claims approximately 790 million annually, about 65 percent of the nation's total.
"We are extremely pleased with CMS's decision to move additional Medicare claims processing into our data center," CDS account director Phil Surine in a statement. "The modernization and consolidation of Medicare's operations is a great accomplishment for the program, and we are very excited to be a part of it."
By awarding CDS this latest contract, CMS is working to consolidate more than 20 of its data centers into three enterprise data centers as part of its objective to modernize Medicare operations, expand services, increase security and lower costs.
To bolster competition, in 2006, CMS awarded 10-year contracts to CDS, Electronic Data Systems (eds.com) and IBM (ibm.com) to operate the new Enterprise Data Centers, qualifying those three companies to compete for task orders worth $1.9 billion in total.
CDS claims to have one of the largest health care insurance data centers in the world in support of Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE, the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program and Medicare Advantage health plans and other private health plans.
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