SysTest Labs is providing Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) services to the Mississippi Division of Medicaid (DOM) for the implementation and operation of a $9.8 million Electronic Health Record (EHR) and e-Prescribing solution, which includes:

• Web portal access for Medicaid providers to obtain an EHR based on Medicaid medical and prescription claims data
• Web-based e-Prescribing system
• Web portal access for Medicaid providers to obtain hospital discharge information based on Medicaid claims

The end users of the MEHRS/eScript system are authorized and authenticated Mississippi Medicaid providers and MEHRS/eScript Administrators, who will be granted access to a web portal that offers clinical and administrative data about Mississippi DOM beneficiaries.  Additionally, the providers will be able to prescribe electronically, gain insight into their own practice through Shared Health’s Patient Population Manager and Disease & Wellness Registry applications, and be able to enter updates to the clinical repository, including new patients, medications, vital signs, immunizations, and allergies.

The benefits to implementing the MEHRS/eScript system are numerous, but all share a common theme – improved care for the beneficiary while concurrently reducing the cost of that care.  Online access to medical claims and pharmacy claims data offers information to the provider that the beneficiary may be unable to provide, better positioning the provider to identify and treat the beneficiary’s illness, reducing waste and duplicated effort.  Electronic prescribing is a less costly and more efficient use of provider time, and reduces potential errors in deciphering hand written prescriptions at the pharmacy.  Patient Population Manager and Disease & Wellness Registry allow a provider to look across his beneficiary population and quickly identify those beneficiaries whose prior care has deviated from evidence-based guidelines, and to subsequently drill down to the beneficiary level to assist in managing the care for those beneficiaries with one or more predefined disease conditions.

As Mississippi’s IV&V partner, SysTest Labs’ primary services include:

• Project Oversight.  SysTest Labs reviewed all project planning and management plan deliverables for the project and provided input to the state on those plans completeness and adequacy for the areas they were intended to address. Our IV&V Project Manager also attended weekly project management and project work plan meetings, as well as the monthly Executive Steering Committee.  The focus of the project oversight work was to identify risk and issues as quickly as possible and to document those risks and issues in terms of the importance and impact on the project.  Additionally all risk and issues identified also included recommended actions and mitigation strategies. In this area SysTest Labs also provided various white papers to DOM management addressing specific areas of project activity that were problematic and needed more documentation and analysis.  Finally, SysTest Labs provided a monthly project status report directly to the senior management of DOM.  The purpose of this monthly report was to provide an independent assessment of the progress and status of the DDI vendor’s progress.
• System and Integration Test Review.  SysTest Labs conducted detail assessment and analysis of the system and integration test methodologies, practices and outcomes of the DDI vendors test activities.  SysTest Labs prepared detail weekly reports throughout this test phase with an analysis of the DDI’s activities and reports for the week.
• User Acceptance Test Support.  SysTest Labs assisted the state in developing User Acceptance Test (UAT) plans and UAT test cases. SysTest Labs is also slated to assist the state in the execution of UAT by providing subject matter experts to help conduct UAT, review outputs of test, define and track defects and participate in a defect management board made up the state and DDI vendor staff.
• Deliverable Review Reports.  The objective of the SysTest Labs IV&V Team in creating detailed DRR documents is to ensure that the processes and tasks undertaken by the MEHRS/eScript Contractor to configure the MEHRS/eScript system are clearly, thoroughly, and consistently documented.  Each document reviewed is assessed in terms of the standards for clarity and specificity, completeness, quality, risk, and adherence to standards and criteria.  These attributes are measured by use of SysTest Labs’ quality checklists.  As part of our SQM3 methodology, SysTest Labs has documented and catalogued checklists for the various types of deliverables produced for a typical software development project.  The SysTest Labs checklists, which are contained in the SysTest Labs’ Standard Lab Procedures, have been used successfully for review of deliverables in multiple QA and IV&V engagements.  For each deliverable that SysTest Labs reviews in the MEHRS/eScript Project, the appropriate checklist is filled out and these results provide the basis for the IV&V Deliverable Review Report, or DRR. 

In addition to producing the formal DRR documents to assess the quality of the MEHRS/eScript Contractor deliverables, SysTest Labs delivers two more work products for DOM that facilitate the IV&V assessment of the project.  These are a Quality Management Plan (QMP) and a Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM).  The QMP is an overarching document to support the tasks and schedule of the IV&V Team.