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Behind the backlog: The problem-plagued rollout of KEES

State officials called a news conference when they inked a $188 million contract in the summer of 2011 for a new high-tech Medicaid enrollment system with Accenture, a Dublin-based multinational professional services giant.

They said the new Kansas Eligibility Enforcement System, or KEES, would replace a clunky paper-based enrollment system that sometimes took up to 45 days. The new system, they said, would allow Kansans who provided the correct information through an online portal to enroll within a day or two.

That hasn’t happened.

After years of missed deadlines, cost overruns and interagency squabbles, KEES still isn’t working as advertised. Medicaid applications are sometimes taking far longer than they did under the old system — some up to five months — and thousands of poor Kansans are being mistakenly denied coverage because of glitches in the system.

–Andy Marso is a reporter for KHI News Service, an editorially independent initiative of the Kansas Health Institute and a partner in Heartland …