Digital Tools for the Digital Age - Bringing the County into the 21st Century

Yesterday I again supported modernizing the digital tools that County Administration uses, to help bring us into the 21st century.

As everyone might recall, shortly after I was elected in 2016, the County Board decided to spend nearly $1 million dollars to update its payroll system.  It was a decision I fully supported, as the system that the County was using was nearly 30 years old.  The system worked on green-screen, DOS-based technology.  It had no capability to connect to the County’s computer network, which meant that floppy drives were used to transfer data into our accounting system.  On top of all this, finding programmers who could resolve software errors was becoming increasingly difficult.  Three years later, Th e new payroll system is now installed and working great.

Yesterday at the Human Services committee meeting, we reviewed another digital system that needs updating.  Our Human Services department currently uses an electronic health records management system that was installed 7 years ago, in 2012.  The system is designed for small medical clinics that only have 1 or 2 practitioners, not for multi-faceted county departments.  The system is cumbersome and overworked.  It does not produce the reports and data that department heads need to have in order to make informed decisions.  When state and federal requirements change, the vendor who supplied this software offers no resources to address those changes, leaving our I.T. Department to try to reprogram the software.

Worst of all, we may very well be missing out on the opportunity to bill out between $400,000 and $600,000 per year in billable expenses due to our inadequate electronic health records management system.  I can’t blame our administrative staff for that, as they were never given the proper tools.

It would be unfair of me to make any comments on why the current electronic health records system was installed 7 years ago.  I wasn’t on the board then, and the current Human Services staff was not in place then.  It is entirely possible that the County Board in 2012 thought they were putting in an adequate system.

That said, it wasn’t an adequate system.  So now we are making the decision to give the County Administration a system that should meet its needs.  The new system is used by 26 other counties in Wisconsin, along with counties in all 50 states.  By all appearances, it appears to be exactly the system we need.  While the 5 year cost is $1.2 million dollars, it should enable use to recoup another $2 million to $3 million dollars in billable expenses.  In other words, it should more than pay for itself.  On top of that, it will help us provide better service to the people of Washington County by integrating data between departments, and it will give management the information it needs to make fully informed care decisions.

I am supporting this update.  In the 21st century, virtually everything is computerized.  We have to make sure our county has the proper digital tools to meet the needs of the 21st century.