An expert system for determining Medicaid eligibility

The eligibility requirements for AFDC Medicaid are so extensive and complicated that most health care providers do not attempt to ascertain whether or not a particular patient is eligible for the program, even when no other source of payment is available. This results in lost revenue for health service providers nationwide amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Computer technology, in the form of expert systems, offers an opportunity to rationalize the Medicaid eligibility determination process and to do real-time assessments of patient eligibility. This article presents an expert system called MEDELEX (MEdicaid ELigibility EXpert) for determining Medicaid eligibility. The program (when run on an 8 MHz MS-DOS microcomputer with at least 640 KB of RAM) requires about 20 min for data entry and 5 sec for the actual eligibility determination. The expert system was written in Prolog and has been designed in such a way that it can be readily modified to take into account the state-to-state variability in eligibility requirements for AFDC Medicaid.