When the Kansas Health Policy Authority issued permanent plastic ID cards to its Medicaid beneficiaries, making information readily available became a necessity.

The Member Web Service Portal went live in late January, giving HPA an pportunity o xpand the amount of information dispersed and level of electronic interaction between provider and beneficiary, said Andy Allison, MD, Medicaid director.

In the brief time the system has been up, thousands of hits have been recorded, he said. Provider directory searches, confirmation of eligibility in real time and tracking of spending in real time are areas of high usage, Allison said.

The portal provides self-service for the insurance business component, but next steps will incorporate reporting and communications. In the future, the portal will evolve to connect to personal health records and electronic medical records, he said.

EDS, which developed and implemented the portal and is also the fiscal agent of Kansas’ State Medicaid Program, is noting that state Medicaid Programs that already have self-service provider Web portals are developing a self-service member portals, said Tripp Fulton, account manager for EDS. “It’s a natural progression,” he said.

West Virginia, Arizona and Georgia are implementing member portals with Medicaid Transformation Grants. Despite the proliferation of activity, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, does not provide any guidance due to different program and technical requirements across states, said spokeswoman Mary Kahn.

The Medicaid beneficiary Web portal of today provides very basic functionality, said Carl Doty, vice president and research director at Forrester Research.

“Given the dismally low adoption of member portals in the private sector, I think that the chances of widespread adoption of these same kinds of services among the Medicaid population are very slim,” he said.

Doty says he remains skeptical whether this particular population can “really behave like empowered consumers.” At this point, he said, “there is little to no incentive for them to engage in online services that provide them with personal healthcare information.”

Nonetheless, Tripp said that the member portal provides valuable self-service.

And as the unemployment rate rises and Medicaid enrollment is expected to go up, the self-service functionality will ease the administrative burden, Allison said.