Texas Health and Human Services

In 2015, the Texas legislature mandated that in order to better serve its constituents, the Texas Health and Human Services (HHS) had to transform from its five agency structure to three agencies.  The consolidation is an opportunity to restructure the system to make it more functional, efficient, effective and responsive for our clients and stakeholders.  A holistic data governance and data management system was needed to meet the September 1, 2017 deadline for agency consolidation.  Understanding, identifying, integrating and managing the data from across the agency was the biggest challenge.  The agency owned hundreds of IT systems but a catalogue of data assets was non-existent.  Some of the largest IT systems serve the state’s Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) programs which account for over 4.2 million clients.  Additionally, the healthcare transactional systems that process the Medicaid and CHIP data were very large, complex, siloed, and in some cases process hundreds of millions of transactions per month.  HHS established a functional Enterprise Data Governance program with Informatica’s Intelligent Data Platform (IDP) solution in order to connect disparate siloed data sources to deliver the best version of the truth master data for HHS clients and providers. Results: HHS is on target to meet the September 1, 2017 legal deadline to collapse five agencies into three. A functional HHS Enterprise Data Governance program means HHS has an effective and judicious identification of who, what, when, where, why and how. The HHS data asset inventory project now includes 200 data assets that identify key meaningful metrics for executive leadership. The HHS Insights Project (master data management) should be complete its initial release in mid-2016.  The promise of the Project is to be able to identify all the services clients receive to see if there are additional programs that could improve clients’ health and well-being and many other additional purposes, including risk and compliance analysis.