Medicaid Redesign: Uniform Assessment System for Long-Term Care in New York State

The following project updates, presentations/webinars and training videos contain outdated UAS information and materials.
All current information is located on the UAS–NY main page.

As part of the Medicaid Redesign effort in New York State, the Office of Long Term Care is creating a system to facilitate uniform assessments for home and community-based programs in New York State.

In August 2010, the Department of Health issued an RFP to obtain the services of a qualified vendor to build a uniform assessment system for New York State. In March 2011, GCOM Software, Inc. was selected as the winning vendor of the competitive bidding process and is scheduled to begin work on the system in May.

The electronic system, which will be called UAS-NY (Uniform Assessment System for New York), will be based on a uniform data set and will standardize and automate needs assessments for home and community based programs in New York.

The Department of Health has selected the interRAI Suite of assessment instruments to be the basis of the tool. interRAI is a collaborative network of researchers in over 30 countries committed to improving health care for persons who are elderly, frail, or disabled. Their goal is to promote evidence-based clinical practice and policy decisions through the collection and interpretation of high quality data. The interRAI organization and its assessment tools are used in many states as well as Canada and other countries.

UAS-NY will facilitate access to programs and services, eliminate duplicative assessment data, and improve consistency in the assessment process. Fragmentation in the delivery of long term care services will be addressed by the standardized assessment of functional and other needs through an empirically tested and validated means.

The Department of Health will be reaching out to stakeholders in the coming weeks to participate in implementation planning activities. There will also be materials available on the MRT website to keep the public updated on progress. Questions can be sent to uasny@health.ny.gov.