A top state official says 9,000 residents have transferred from MassHealth to the Massachusetts Health Connector since April as part of the post-COVID Medicaid redetermination process.

“That’s a little bit more than we were even expecting for this time,” said Audrey Morse Gasteier, executive director of the Massachusetts Health Connector, on The Codcast. “The topline is it’s early days but we are seeing strong activity. The operations are holding.”

After a three-year hiatus brought about by COVID, April 1 was the start date for the redetermination process, which seeks to verify that those on Medicaid are entitled to receive it. Roughly 2.3 million Medicaid recipients need to be assessed, with early predictions estimating 300,000 residents on MassHealth could be dropped from the rolls. The big concern is that those who are dropped quickly find new coverage, which is why those affected are automatically told whether they qualify for health plans at the Connector.

Gasteier said the early movement to the Connector came from MassHealth recipients who were pro-actively updating their account information and learning they were going to lose their coverage. She indicated to John McDonough of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Paul Hattis of the Lown Institute that the transition went smoothly, but the bulk of redeterminations will come this summer and fall.

“There are some states that don’t particularly mind shedding folks off of their Medicaid rolls and aren’t particularly concerned where people land. That’s obviously not the case with Massachusetts,” Gasteier said. “We have 97 percent of our residents in coverage. We don’t want to see backsliding on that. We don’t want to see people losing their coverage and becoming uninsured.”

The 97 percent coverage rate is the highest in the nation, but Massachusetts hasn’t been able to trim it more. “We think about this every day. That last 3 percent has been a challenge,” Gasteier said.