State Health Insurance Assistance Programs National Performance Report

The State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIP) provides free, in-depth, one-on-one insurance counseling and assistance annually to about 3 million Medicare beneficiaries, their families, friends, and caregivers. SHIPs operate in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

AIR developed and maintained the SHIP National Performance Report (NPR) program from 2007 to 2014 to provide continuous monitoring by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and periodic reports to Congress and other stakeholders on SHIP performance and outcomes. The NPR effort included secure web databases for data collection and reporting; a sophisticated method for benchmarking and assessing state performance; user-friendly performance dashboards and other data visualizations; extensive technical assistance and training to approximately 13,000 SHIP staff and application users; and support for meeting federal data system security requirements.

During the contract, AIR rebuilt the SHIP NPR database and web applications; substantially improved data quality and completeness; greatly improved performance management protocols; and successfully moved the SHIP NPR from a relatively non-secure hosting environment to a dedicated, high-security federal data center. For each year that AIR held the SHIP NPR contract, the SHIP system set all-time-high records in the number of client contacts and public and media outreach events. In 2014, responsibilities for SHIP were transferred from CMS to the Administration for Community Living.