Plan devised for HIV clinics

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District officials announced a plan yesterday to help the troubled HIV/AIDS Administration catch up on late payments to community-based caregivers, which has contributed to a financial crisis at the Whitman-Walker Clinic and other organizations.

D.C. Department of Health Director Dr. Gregg A. Pane said revising accounting rules will help the administration pay the nonprofit clinics within 20 to 30 days. The reform was spurred by complaints that the existing system is cumbersome and takes as long as six months to make payments.

As a result, the department is moving to an electronic-payment system to make checks each quarter, compared with the paper-based system that includes reviewing invoices on as many as eight levels before providers are paid.

"I expect to have this working ...and I am not going to tolerate otherwise," Dr. Pane said in testimony to the D.C. Council Committee on Health.

D.C. Council member David Catania, at-large independent and chairman of the health committee, criticized the health department last week about the late payments, but yesterday said the changes will be "an enormous improvement" if they can be implemented.

The District has one of the highest AIDS rates in the country, with 170.6 cases per 100,000 residents. City health officials say 12,000 to 15,000 residents may be living with HIV.

Dr. Pane said the new plan also includes administration officials conducting "enhanced site visits" to nonprofit organizations funded through the HIV/AIDS Administration.

The change follows recent disclosures about an ongoing D.C. Office of the Inspector General inquiry that found the administration had employees who didn't know the addresses of some of the organizations they were supposed to monitor.

"We have a broken system, but we're fixing it," Dr. Pane said.

Whitman-Walker, the largest provider of HIV/AIDS services in the area, said the city this week finally paid about $338,000 owed to the clinic.