Summary: The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) and its contractors are extremely behind schedule in repairing, testing, and implementing the mission-critical computer systems supporting Medicare. HCFA has recently begun to improve its management of Year 2000 issues, including establishing a Year 2000 organization and hiring independent contractors to oversee the work. However, because of the complexity and magnitude of the problem and HCFA's late start, the repairs lag far behind schedule. Less than one-third of Medicare's 98 mission-critical systems had been fully renovated as of June 1998, and none had been validated or implemented, according to HCFA. Compounding this difficult task is the absence of key management practices HCFA needs to adequately direct and monitor its Year 2000 project. HCFA also has not effectively managed the identification and correction of its electronic data exchanges. Because of the magnitude of the tasks ahead and the limited time remaining, it is unlikely that all of the Medicare systems will be compliant in time to guarantee uninterrupted benefits and services into the year 2000.
