Sign In
Welcome to the California Department of Health Care Services 
Skip Navigation LinksHome > Services > Medi-Cal > DRAQuestions and Answerspage40

MEDS changes to satisfy the citizenship/identity verification requirements ............ page 40

  • Question 1:  Should the AP19 transaction be triggered when Medi-Cal is requested OR approved?      
  • Answer 1:  If needed, when Medi-Cal is requested.  If citizenship/identity and/or identity have already been verified (per MEDS INQE screen) but the client has provided a higher level of verification with the current application, the higher level verification is reported to MEDS.  Otherwise, if citizenship and/or identity have already been verified, the corresponding citizenship and/or identity fields need not be reported.  Thus, in determining whether or not to send an AP19, counties will want to take into account what is in the citizenship and identity documentation fields on MEDS; however, if an AP19 is sent with equal or lower level citizenship and/or identity verification information than what is already in MEDS, the information will be ignored and no alerts will be generated.      
  • Question 2:  Is the AP19 transaction triggered separately for citizenship and identity, for instance when evidence of citizenship is verified but identity is not, do we send the AP19 transaction with the citizenship information first, then generate a second AP19 transaction when the identification is verified at a later date?   
  • Answer 2:  The AP19 can be used to report citizenship only, identity only, or both.  It can be triggered separately.  Either citizenship or identity can be reported first.  Thus, a SAWS system or MEDS online session can report citizenship first and then report identity at a later date.  For purposes of eligibility, both the citizenship and identity documentation requirements must be satisfied if an applicant or beneficiary declares U.S. citizenship or national status.
  • Question 3:  (posted 11/15/07):  The Department informed counties that MEDS changes have been implemented to handle the new citizenship/identity requirements.  Specifically, the State developed a new AP19 transaction for online and batch reporting.  If the counties send a blank value in any of the fields that trigger an AP19 transaction will it overwrite the respective fields in MEDS if those fields are already populated with data? If the answer is no, what happens to the data in the respective fields in MEDS?  If the counties send a blank field, does it update MEDS?  If yes; will counties be able to change the field if non blank data is sent in a subsequent AP19?  Would sending a blank field cause the transaction to be rejected?
  • Answer 3:  (posted 11/15/07):  Space(s) are acceptable values for some data elements in MEDS, but MEDS does not use blank values.  The data element dictionary page for each data element identifies the specific valid values for that data element.  In addition, the data element dictionary page for a specific element will indicate whether a user can request that the data element be removed from MEDS.  (On a batch transaction, a removal request is indicated by reporting the data element number followed by an equal sign and a comma.) 

    If a space is a valid value for a data element and cross data edits do not preclude changing the value to a space, then MEDS will be updated when a space is reported.  If a space is not a valid value for a data element, then an alert will be issued and that data element will be removed from the transaction when a space is reported.  Removal of that data element may cause the transaction to be rejected if that data element is required based on other data elements reported on the transaction.  Counties should note that the expected design of batch MEDS transactions is that a data element is not reported when there is no data to report unless there is incorrect data on MEDS that can be and needs to be removed.