Month: August 2016
Olympics was ‘experience of a lifetime,’ KCK resident says
by Mary Rupert
Lydia Paterson, who returned to Kansas City, Kan., on Wednesday after competing in the Olympics, has positive memories of her trip to Rio de Janeiro.
“It was the experience of a lifetime getting to meet all the Olympic athletes,” Paterson said. The 19-year-old competed for the United States in the 10m air pistol competition, but did not win a medal.
While there were some media reports about a few of the buildings in Rio not being totally complete before the Olympics, Paterson did not have that experience, and said, “Our rooms were great, the cafeteria was great.”
A 2015 graduate of Piper High School in Kansas City, Kan., Paterson currently is a student at the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth, Kan. Her parents are Ron and Letha Paterson of Kansas City, Kan.
Paterson, one of the youngest members of the U.S. women’s Olympics shooting team, had been to many World Cup events, but this was her first Olympics, and it was “a different type of pressure,” she said.
She has been under pressure in many national and world events previously. She was the 2014 National Junior Olympic Champion. At the Munich World Cup in 2015, she was eighth. At the U.S. Olympic trials the first week of June, she won by 24 points, qualifying her to go to Rio.
“The pressure (at the Olympics) was definitely different, but I tried to do my best and thrive at it,” she said.
Paterson was 29th in the field of 44 competitors in the qualifying rounds for the women’s 10m air pistol in the Rio Olympics. A second U.S. athlete, Enkelejda Shehaj, who lives in Naples, Fla., came in 40th. The gold medal for the event was won by Russian athlete Vitalina Batsarashkina.
Paterson got her start in the Wyandotte County 4-H Shooting Sports program when she was 7 years old, and went with her family to shooting events.
She competed in the 4-H shooting sports program until age 18, when she “aged out” of the program.
She said she is thankful to her family, friends, support group, and her college for allowing her to compete and travel.
“My mom and dad, brother and grandparents were always there every step of the way, and my coach (Cody Owsley),” she said. “I’m definitely thankful for their support. Without them I would not have had the experience of going to Rio.”
She plans to stop by Piper High School and thank the teachers who supported her, she said.
Paterson now is focused on college, and the fall semester starts this month. She is majoring in biology at USM and may eventually go into something in the medical field, such as physical therapy.
As far as competing in shooting events at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, she said she wasn’t sure. “I don’t know what my future will hold right now,” she said. She plans to take some time off and reevaluate.
She offered some advice for other young athletes in Wyandotte County who may want to go to the Olympics: “I would definitely say hard work and dedication is the No. 1 things that get any Olympians to the games. You have to put in the time and effort to your sport and chase your dreams and not be afraid of failure – really going for it, no matter what the challenges might be.”
Kansas signs $215M contract for new Medicaid computer system
by Andy Marso, KHI News Service
Computer giant Hewlett Packard Enterprises has entered into a $215 million contract with the state of Kansas to upgrade a Medicaid computer system that tracks patient claims payments to providers.
According to a recent news release from the California-based company, Hewlett Packard Enterprises, or HPE, will work with partners that include Kansas City-based Cerner to overhaul the state’s Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS) to meet new federal standards.
“HPE will strengthen the state’s ability to manage Medicaid policies and finances across disparate programs and agencies,” the news release said.
Angela de Rocha, a spokeswoman for state agencies, said the state will fund about 20 percent of the project with the federal government picking up the rest.
Kansas officials signed a contract of similar value in 2011 with Accenture to replace the computer system used to determine Medicaid eligibility with an upgrade called the Kansas Eligibility Enforcement System, or KEES.
That system went live last year after significant delays. It has failed to live up to the original promises of processing speed and accuracy, which has contributed to a backlog of thousands of Medicaid applications.
Developers who worked on KEES expressed concerns in emails about the program’s ability to communicate with the state’s current MMIS, which eventually will be replaced by the new HPE software.
The HPE software, known as the Kansas Modular Medicaid System, will take approved applications and enter them into a database of the state’s more than 400,000 Medicaid recipients. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment and the three private insurance companies that administer Kansas Medicaid, or KanCare, will use it to track and pay Medicaid claims to providers.
In the news release, HPE promises to deliver a product that is more flexible than the current system. It said the new system has the potential to swap out individual portions of the program and update them to interact with other software without taking down the whole system.
“Kansas will have a new information technology foundation for our Medicaid enterprise that will allow us to communicate targeted, actionable information from more sources in near real time to decision-makers,” KDHE secretary Susan Mosier said in a statement included in the news release. “This foundation will support changes over time to meet future program needs. By selecting HPE, we have partnered with an innovative company that understands the unique technological challenges of Medicaid delivery.”
KHI News Service requested information from KDHE about the funding sources for the HPE project. That request is pending.
HPE also said that Cerner, which specializes in electronic medical records software, will ensure the new system can organize Medicaid claims data from multiple sources into a single patient record.
A Cerner program called HealtheEDW will give system users at KDHE quicker access to data related to patient care and health outcomes, assisting the state’s efforts to steer Medicaid patients toward the right treatments at the right time.
Zane Burke, president of Cerner, said partnering with HPE on the upgrade will create an “unprecedented opportunity” to improve the delivery of health care services through KanCare.
“Historically, states collected analysis based on retroactive claims data,” Burke said in the news release. “Working with HPE, Kansas’ Medicaid program will be able to produce intelligence based on claims plus clinical and financial information in near-real time.”
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