Monday, July 27, 2026

MEDICAID NEWS SUMMARY – JUNE 2026

 

SYRTIS SOLUTIONS MONTHLY MEDICAID NEWS MAILER

Syrtis Solutions distributes a monthly Medicaid news digest designed to keep policymakers and healthcare leaders informed. The summary highlights key developments in Medicaid program integrity, coordination of benefits, cost avoidance, and efforts to prevent improper payments, fraud, waste, and abuse. Below is a summary of last month’s news.

Read the full summary.


Monday, June 29, 2026

SYRTIS SOLUTIONS AUTOMATED ALGORITHMIC ANALYSIS AND INSURANCE DISCOVERY ENGINE HAS BECOME ESSENTIAL TO MODERN MEDICAID OPERATIONS

 

SYRTIS SOLUTIONS AUTOMATED ALGORITHMIC ANALYSIS AND INSURANCE DISCOVERY ENGINE (AAAIDE) HAS BECOME ESSENTIAL TO MODERN MEDICAID

Automated algorithmic analysis and insurance discovery engines (AAAIDE) are becoming cornerstones of modern Medicaid operations. By identifying liable third-party coverage at the point of claim adjudication, these technologies reduce improper payments, strengthen payment accuracy, and improve coordination of benefits.

This priority is now reflected in state policy. On June 10, 2026, Ohio passed Senate Bill 315, which requires the Ohio Department of Medicaid to use automated algorithmic analysis and insurance discovery engines before making any Medicaid payment. The measure reflects a broader regulatory shift toward prevention over post-payment recovery.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (HR1), states must maintain improper payment rates below 3% by federal fiscal year 2030, measured through PERM audits that flag claims where Medicaid was billed as primary despite active third-party coverage. Critically, PERM audits measure compliance at the point of adjudication: once a claim is paid improperly, recovery cannot reverse the improper payment designation. Only point-of-claim insurance discovery prevents both the improper payment and the HR1 compliance risk simultaneously. Traditional post-payment recovery addresses cost but not compliance.

Long before this legislative requirement, Syrtis Solutions was delivering these capabilities to Medicaid managed care organizations nationwide. ProTPL, Syrtis' proprietary platform, continuously analyzes claim-level eligibility and coverage data to identify active commercial insurance, Medicare, and other liable third-party coverage at the point of adjudication, surfacing coverage that traditional monthly or quarterly eligibility files miss entirely.

This point-of-claim approach improves coordination of benefits, supports cost avoidance initiatives, and directly addresses PERM audit compliance. As Medicaid programs face HR1 improper payment standards and deadline pressure, real-time insurance discovery has become essential to compliance strategy.

About Syrtis Solutions: Syrtis Solutions provides insurance discovery, coordination of benefits, and payment integrity solutions for Medicaid agencies and Medicaid managed care organizations. Through ProTPL, Syrtis helps clients identify previously unknown commercial coverage, optimize third-party liability routing, and support PERM compliance while helping clients meet Medicaid's payer-of-last-resort requirements.

For more information, contact:                                                                            Steve Konsin, Jr.                                                                                                          866-960-9358                                                                          info@syrtissolutions.com                                                            www.syrtissolutions.com

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Wednesday, June 10, 2026

MEDICAID HEADLINES – MAY 2026

 

SYRTIS SOLUTIONS MONTHLY MEDICAID NEWS MAILER

To keep Medicaid professionals informed, Syrtis Solutions compiles a monthly overview of key Medicaid news. The report focuses on developments in program integrity, coordination of benefits, cost avoidance strategies, and ongoing efforts to reduce improper payments and fraud across the healthcare system. The following section summarizes last month’s news.

Click here to read more. 

Friday, May 29, 2026

DRUG PRICING REFORM AND MEDICAID COST AVOIDANCE: WHY BOTH MATTER

WHY COST AVOIDANCE MUST EXTEND BEYOND DRUG PRICING REFORM SYRTIS SOLUTIONS

Drug pricing reform is often at the center of discussions about Medicaid cost containment. Whether the focus is prescription drugs, hospital reimbursement rates, or provider payments, the underlying assumption is typically the same: lowering the cost of healthcare services will reduce overall program spending. While pricing initiatives can generate meaningful savings, they address only part of the equation. Before Medicaid can fully benefit from any pricing reform, it must first ensure that claims are being paid accurately and only when Medicaid is the proper payer.
Every year, billions of dollars are spent on claims that were the liability of another primary payer. These expenditures are not necessarily driven by fraud or abuse. More often, they result from incomplete information, delayed data updates, and gaps in visibility at the time a claim is processed.
As policymakers pursue long-term solutions to rising healthcare costs, Medicaid agencies should not overlook one of the most immediate opportunities available: preventing avoidable improper payments before they occur.

Unknown Coverage Creates Significant Financial Leakage


Insurance coverage is constantly changing. Beneficiaries gain and lose commercial insurance throughout the year as employment, family status, and eligibility circumstances evolve. The challenge for Medicaid is that these changes often go unnoticed during claims adjudication.
A beneficiary may obtain employer-sponsored coverage, become eligible under a spouse's health plan, or transition between public and private coverage months before the information is fully reflected in Medicaid systems. During that period, claims continue to be processed using incomplete data. The result is avoidable spending that accumulates claim by claim, day after day, across large populations. For many programs, unknown commercial coverage is one of the largest barriers to effective coordination of benefits and accurate payments.

Prevention Produces Results Faster Than Recovery


Historically, many organizations have depended on post-payment recovery efforts to address improper payments. Once an issue is discovered, resources are devoted to identifying responsible parties, recovering funds, and correcting records. Although these activities remain necessary, they are inherently reactive. The better outcome is preventing the payment from occurring in the first place.
When accurate eligibility information and third-party liability data are available before adjudication, claims can be directed appropriately, ensuring Medicaid dollars remain in the program. This reduces administrative burden, improves operational efficiency, and strengthens payment accuracy at the point where it matters most. Preventing an improper payment eliminates the need to recover it later.

Why Data Quality Matters


Successful payment prevention depends on visibility. Medicaid programs can only coordinate benefits effectively when they have access to timely, accurate, and complete coverage information. Outdated records, delayed reporting, fragmented data sources, and incomplete eligibility information all contribute to payment decisions being made with an incomplete picture of beneficiary coverage.
Improving data quality enables agencies and managed care organizations to identify coverage earlier, verify eligibility more accurately, and make better payment decisions throughout the claims lifecycle. The impact extends far beyond any single claim category or service type.

A Comprehensive Approach to Cost Containment


Reducing healthcare costs and improving payment accuracy should not be viewed as competing priorities. Drug pricing initiatives, rebate programs, and purchasing reforms may help reduce Medicaid's payments for certain services and medications. At the same time, payment prevention strategies help ensure Medicaid pays only when it is the appropriate payer. Together, these approaches create a stronger foundation for program integrity. However, only one of them addresses the problem of claims being paid with incomplete eligibility information or unidentified third-party coverage. That is why prevention remains such a critical component of any cost-containment strategy.

The Opportunity Available Right Now


Large-scale policy reforms often require years of development, implementation, and evaluation before their full impact becomes clear. Payment prevention does not. 
By improving eligibility accuracy, identifying unknown commercial coverage, strengthening third-party liability operations, and enhancing coordination of benefits processes, Medicaid programs can begin reducing avoidable expenditures immediately. The technology exists. The data sources exist. The operational frameworks exist. 
The challenge is no longer whether prevention is possible. The challenge is ensuring Medicaid programs have the visibility necessary to make accurate payment decisions before claims are paid.

Drug pricing reform will remain an important component of Medicaid's long-term cost-containment strategy, but some of the most significant savings opportunities are already within reach. Programs that prioritize accurate eligibility data, early identification of third-party coverage, and proactive payment prevention can immediately reduce financial leakage, improve payment accuracy, and strengthen program integrity. Lower prices can reduce claim costs, but preventing Medicaid from paying claims that should have been covered elsewhere can preserve valuable program resources regardless of the claim's cost.

Monday, May 11, 2026

THIS MONTH IN MEDICAID – APRIL 2026

 

SYRTIS SOLUTIONS MONTHLY MEDICAID NEWS MAILER

Syrtis Solutions shares a monthly Medicaid news brief that tracks the latest policy, research, and industry developments affecting Medicaid programs. Topics include program integrity, cost avoidance initiatives, coordination of benefits, improper payment reduction, and fraud, waste, and abuse oversight. The following section summarizes last month’s Medicaid news.

Read the news.

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

REDUCING IMPROPER MEDICAID PAYMENTS BEFORE THEY OCCUR

 

"Reducing Improper Medicaid Payments Before They Occur – Syrtis Solutions Proactive Prevention Strategies for FMAP Protection and Real-Time TPL Verification"

Stephen Konsin Jr. from Syrtis Solutions, a solution provider at the Marcus Evans Value-Based Care Summit 2026, discusses the growing need for proactive Medicaid payment accuracy and cost avoidance strategies.

Interview with: Stephen Konsin Jr., Vice President of Sales, Syrtis Solutions

“The window for demonstrating proactive prevention of improper payments before the 2030 mandatory Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) reductions is narrowing with each fiscal quarter. Organizations that act now will be positioning themselves to meet federal compliance expectations while realizing multi-year operational benefits. Those that delay it will have limited time to demonstrate sustained improvement trends, reducing options for mitigating FMAP consequences,” says Stephen Konsin Jr., Vice President of Sales, Syrtis Solutions.

Syrtis Solutions is a solution provider at the Marcus Evans Value-Based Care Summit 2026.

What is changing with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act? What do healthcare leaders need to plan for?

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R. 1) converts improper payment performance from a compliance benchmark into a direct funding trigger. Beginning in FY2030, states will face mandatory FMAP reductions when Medicaid improper payment rates exceed three percent. This represents a paradigm shift from discretionary oversight to automatic financial penalties, with only limited waiver authority available to states demonstrating good-faith corrective action. FMAP reductions are triggered by error rates at adjudication, not by net financial impact after recovery efforts.

For healthcare organizations, unknown primary commercial insurance coverage represents a significant preventable category of improper Medicaid payments. When beneficiaries have unreported or recently activated commercial insurance, Medicaid systems lack real-time visibility at claim adjudication. Traditional third-party (TPL) liability infrastructure cannot close this gap. TPL programs mostly rely on member self-disclosure, delayed batch feeds, and periodic data matching that structurally miss coverage changes between verification cycles. What was improper at adjudication remains improper in Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM) calculations regardless of later corrective action.

Why is the compliance clock ticking? What strategies could they implement to reduce improper payments before they occur?

We address this structural constraint through real-time access to nationwide commercial payer eligibility data. The platform verifies primary coverage by identifying previously unknown commercial insurance, enabling prevention before Medicaid payment occurs. This directly addresses the compliance metric triggering FMAP reductions. For Medicaid agencies and managed care organizations facing mandatory FMAP consequences, the compliance timeline is compressed. Organizations implementing real-time prevention capabilities now can demonstrate multi-year improvement trends before 2030 consequences take effect, thus creating the operational track record that limited waiver authority requires.

The FY2030 FMAP reduction mandate transforms prevention from operational “best practice” to fiscal imperative. States can no longer rely on recovery performance to manage TPL compliance. The PERM methodology measures error rates at adjudication, creating permanent advantages for prevention approaches that stop improper payments before they occur. Recovery programs remain necessary components of comprehensive TPL operations, addressing improper payments that evade prevention systems and managing historical claims. However, recovery alone cannot achieve FMAP compliance when error rates exceed three percent. Only prevention capabilities that reduce gross improper payment rates can protect federal medical assistance funds under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act requirements.

Why can’t traditional approaches solve this?

The fundamental constraint is data availability at the time of claims payment. The traditional pay-and-chase model is a rational response to ensure beneficiary access through prompt payment. However, this model cannot prevent FMAP reductions as it addresses errors after they occur.

Prospective prevention eliminates improper claims payments before occurrence by verifying coverage at payment decision and routing all future claims appropriately. A claim correctly routed to commercial insurance never appears as an improper Medicaid payment in PERM audits. It requires no identification, investigation, recovery or reconciliation. It creates no provider friction, member confusion or administrative burden. Cost avoidance is permanent and the improper payment never exists. This is not incremental improvement to recovery but a structural shift from retrospective correction to prospective prevention.

Does it work with their existing infrastructure?

Syrtis does not replace disclosed coverage already captured in eligibility systems, traditional carrier feeds or batch matching processes. It supplements existing infrastructure by addressing the specific gap those systems structurally cannot close. It identifies commercial coverage never disclosed to the state, coverage that changed since the last data match and coverage resulting from recent life events not yet in batch systems. Typical deployments reach full operational status within three months of project initiation, well within the window needed to begin building a measurable compliance track record before 2030 consequences take effect. The platform is designed to minimize implementation risk while maximizing operational resilience.

Any final thoughts?

In an environment where FMAP protection depends on preventing improper payments rather than recovering them afterward, the difference between prevention and recovery is the difference between maintaining federal matching funds and facing mandatory reductions compounding with every fiscal year.

Federal auditors will increasingly differentiate between programs that have embedded real-time prevention into operations versus those reliant on retrospective correction. The operational track record of implementing real-time verification in 2026, processing millions of claims over subsequent years, and identifying thousands of previously unknown commercial policies with measurable TPL-related improper rate declines presents a fundamentally different compliance profile than maintaining robust recovery while continuing payment without real-time verification.

Contact: Sarin Kouyoumdjian-Gurunlian, Press Manager, Marcus Evans, Summits Division, press@marcusevanscy.com

Click here to enter you details for more information.

About the Value-Based Care Summit 2026

The Value-Based Care Summit aims to foster innovative thinking, share inspiring ideas, and promote community connections. Our continuing mission is to curate an engaging program featuring visionary keynote presentations, real-life case studies and interactive forums delivered by compelling speakers and expert moderators. To achieve this vision we choose our collaborators with great precision – we seek out professionals who have deep expertise and hands-on experience, and can present cutting-edge insights that spark conversation.

About Syrtis Solutions

Syrtis Solutions was founded in 2011 after seeing payers of last resort – Medicaid, Medicare and Marketplace plans – struggle to properly identify third-party liability (TPL) information quickly and accurately. Still today, health plans rely on stale data mined from millions of other health insurance (OHI) coverage records that are incomplete, often expired, and frequently for the wrong member. This poor-quality data leads to member disruption and provider abrasion at the pharmacy counter, OHI overrides, and claims paid in error which fuels ineffective “pay and chase” recovery solutions – returning less than 17% of dollars attempted for recovery.

Today, we are helping solve this problem for health plans – looking for OHI on 42% of the Medicaid managed care lives covered by 83 different health plans. If you are looking for a better OHI discovery solution that reduces your reliance on “pay and chase” efforts – we invite you to meet with us. With as few as 5,000 member records, we can show you the opportunities you are missing and the quality of your current OHI data. Within just a few weeks, you will see your OHI cost avoidance efforts increase due to better quality OHI data, and we bet you will see less OHI override calls to your member services and pharmacy help desk as well!

www.syrtis.com

About Marcus Evans Summits

Marcus Evans Summits are high level business forums for the world’s leading decision-makers to meet, learn and discuss strategies and solutions. Held at exclusive locations around the world, these events provide attendees with a unique opportunity to individually tailor their schedules of keynote presentations, case studies, roundtables and one-on-one business meetings. For more information, please visit www.marcusevans.com

All rights reserved. The above content may be republished or reproduced. Kindly inform us by sending an email to press@marcusevanscy.com

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Monday, April 20, 2026

MEDICAID INDUSTRY UPDATE – MARCH 2026

 

SYRTIS SOLUTIONS MONTHLY MEDICAID NEWS MAILER

Our monthly Medicaid news summary highlights important developments affecting Medicaid programs nationwide. The roundup focuses on research findings, regulatory changes, and policy discussions related to program integrity, cost avoidance, coordination of benefits, and efforts to address improper payments and fraud. Below is a recap of last month’s Medicaid headlines.

Learn more here.