Greetings Everyone,
Last night, our portal developer made some changes to the System that ultimately took some providers “offline”. Fortunately, this was not a very big list of providers, which is exciting to know we are following the WREMAC guidance. I realize that this might be a frustration for some of the providers or agency leadership to have to deal with this change that has occurred, but unfortunately over the years we have put to many bandaids on the system so it was no longer functioning correctly. Last night was a correction of those issues and I wanted to take a moment to explain a few things as we move forward with these changes. Going forward, if a provider does not complete their skills by the deadline of June 30th, it will automatically change your status. To prevent this from happening, please make sure that we are all completing the necessary skills by the due date annually.
One of the other changes that is going to occur sometime in the near future is we are changing the “Online / Offline” to “Compliant / Non-Compliant”. This is more reflective of what is actually occurring in regards to the WREMAC policies and contains a softer tone to providers status. While I do realize some of you find that the portal is pointless and an inconvenience, I do want to say that it does serve a needed purpose. Both the REMSCOs and Program agency are required to collect a a lot of the information that is contained in the portal. It also allows us to track certain expiration dates on your behalf to ensure that your agencies remain compliant with NYS.
Please be patient as we move through these changes. In regards to the recent status change, if you were moved to “offline” please get with your agency and work to correct the deficiencies. It is worth noting that unless you were specifically told by your Medical Director that you are offline, or your Provider card or CPR card is expired, you should not consider yourself “offline” because the portal said so. We understand there is going to be an adjustment period that we need to work through on this and with the changes we are not looking to shake things up.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to your agency or us and we can see what we can do to answer those for you.
Thanks