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GCN Home > 10/09/06 issue

Services hit home

GCN Agency Award | Pa. system tracks quality of life for Pennsylvanians who have disabilities

By Trudy Walsh, GCN Staff

A Web-based client information management system run by Pennsylvania’s Office of Mental Retardation is doing a lot more than just speeding claims processing and tracking services. It’s actually improving the quality of life for Pennsylvanians with mental retardation.

Take, for example, the reporting of incidents that occur in group homes or treatment centers. The Office of Mental Retardation in Pennsylvania’s Public Welfare Department requires 900 provider agencies in the state to report unusual incidents, such as a case of abuse, an illness or a medication error, involving any of the 70,000 people enrolled in one of 48 county mental retardation programs.

Five years ago, this was an entirely paper process, said Patty McCool, regional program manager for the office’s central region.

People in the regional offices would spend hours reading the written reports, McCool said. Sometimes it would take a month for the regional managers to respond to the county.

And each of the 48 counties had its own system, said Gary Rossman, division chief of the Bureau of Information Systems in Pennsylvania’s Public Welfare Department.

Sharing data

Starting in 2000, Pennsylvania began to design the Home and Community Services Information System (HCSIS), a Web-based system that provides agencies within the state’s Public Welfare Department with electronic access to critical health and social-services program data.

Now, an incident is entered into the incident management module as soon as it happens, McCool said. “We can do trend analysis of reports and make improvements,” she said.

And that’s just one piece of HCSIS. The system has modules for quality management, financial management and claims processing, and incident management.

HCSIS’ users include county organizations and provider agencies who offer services to people with developmental or physical disabilities, the elderly and people in the state’s mental health system, said Rossman, project manager of HCSIS. This all comes out to about $2 billion a year in services, he said. The 900 providers who use HCSIS include residential group homes, community day services, therapists, in-home support agencies and even some YMCA facilities.

Each individual enrolled in HCSIS has a support plan that can be called up by authorized users. The plan identifies not only basic information about the person, but also their “hopes and dreams and what they want to accomplish,” McCool said. Before HCSIS, if someone called the regional office with a complaint, the regional office would have to call the county, which would contact the supports coordinator, the person who works directly with the individual. If that person was on vacation, the call would have to go back to the county, adding days or weeks to the process. “Now I can just call up HCSIS and see what notes the supports coordinator put in,” McCool said. “Having that immediate access to information has saved a lot of time, energy and effort.”
Kristen Miller, Gary Rossman, and Terry Shuchart
Image: Rick Steele
HCSIS TEAM: In front of the state Capitol are, from left, Pennsylvania CIO Kristen Miller, project manager Gary Rossman and Public Welfare Department CIO Terry Shuchart.
Ellie Myers, deputy mental retardation administrator for the Dauphin County Office of Mental Health and Mental Retardation Program, said HCSIS’ incident management module has brought “a dramatic improvement” in countY services.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, E-Government, Management, IT Management, State & Local, Web Strategies



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