A Medical Device Daily

Affiliated Computer Services (ACS; Dallas) reported a five year contract, totaling $100 million, with UMass Memorial Health Care (Worcester, Massachusetts), a hospital system, to provide information systems services. The contract will extend an existing six-year relationship.

ACS will provide a method of expanding UMass Memorial's IT systems through deployment of servers and data storage, based on the system's IT infrastructure needs. ACS will provide networking, data systems, data center hosting, desktop, help desk, telecommunications, disaster recovery, and resource planning services.

Through it subsidiary unit, ACS Healthcare Solutions, the company provides an array of services to healthcare delivery, including healthcare transformational outsourcing services.

In other agreements/contracts:

Burgess (Alexandria, Virginia) a Medicare-based data and information technology solutions firm, reported an expanded agreement with its client, Health Net (Woodland Hills), enabling Health Net to price claims for additional major Medicare provider and payment types.

Health Net will continue to be a licensed user of Burgess Reimbursement System (BRS), a modular software solution which enables analyses, modeling of contract payment rates and policies and claims re-pricing. Burgess will continue to provide ongoing user and technical support for the use of the system, as well as Medicare reimbursement education and training.

Amy Falk, Health Net's VP, Configuration, Enterprise Wide, said, "Health Net has decided to expand our use of BRS by purchasing additional provider types. This will enable us to have a single source of Medicare pricing internally."

Burgess specializes in the design and delivery of Medicare-based software, consulting and educational solutions to help manage reimbursement needs. Burgess serves healthcare organizations ranging from insurers and managed care companies to providers and medical technology companies.

Health Net is a publicly traded, managed health care company.

Alpha II (Tallahassee, Florida), a coding, compliance and reimbursement company, reported a contract with CPU Medical Management Systems (San Diego), a provider of information software to medical billing services and physician organizations. Alpha II's ClaimStaker, a claims scrubbing application, will be interfaced with CPU's flagship product, MED/FM, a medical billing and revenue cycle management software system, and offered as a claims scrubber to CPU's clients.

In April, CPU deployed ClaimStaker software to a client, MediNomic, as a beta installation. MediNomics, a revenue cycle management firm, uses ClaimStaker to verify and edit every claim prior to committing the claim or a batch of claims.

ClaimStaker is also helping MediNomics to provide clients with coding education and awareness of reimbursement and compliance issues. "ClaimStaker supports these objectives through its rules-based engine and clear and concise reporting," says Lukacs. "ClaimStaker reports assist our team in providing crucial education and awareness to our clients."

Alpha II's ClaimStaker verifies both professional and institutional claims using medical necessity and coding edits database.