The new year should see California move further along in planning and conversion activities for state health and welfare systems, as officials continue to contemplate the federally mandated consolidation of three entities into one.
Currently, the state maintains three distinct Statewide Automated Welfare Systems (SAWS), which support state public assistance programs by helping recipients determine eligibility and calculate benefits. The three systems are the CalWORKs Information Network (CalWIN), supported by Welfare Client Data System (WCDS); the Los Angeles Eligibility, Automated Determination, Evaluation and Reporting (LEADER) Replacement System (LRS); and Consortium IV (C-IV). LRS and C-IV are supported by the California Automated Consortium Eligibility System (CalACES). Collectively, the three SAWS support programs including Medi-Cal, CalFresh/Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Kinship Guardianship Assistance Payment Program (KinGAP) and Adoption Assistance.
The state is required to migrate CalWIN, LRS and C-IV to a single system by 2023 in order to keep receiving federal financial participation and comply with state and federal architectures, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), according to the CalSAWS Migration Planning & Analysis Assessment: Final Report, recently provided to Techwire.
The oldest of the systems is likely C-IV, which was stood up through a Joint Powers Agreement in 1996 with four member counties, adding 35 more of the state’s 58 counties in 2007. CalWIN, which supports 18 counties, finished its implementation in mid-2006 and is supported by vendor DXC, formerly Hewlett Packard Enterprises, the state Office of Systems Integration (OSI) said in March, in its annual report on SAWS to the Legislature. LRS, which supports Los Angeles County, and 29 percent of the caseload statewide, began a contract with Accenture in late 2012.
With Assembly Bill 1811, which took effect in mid-2018, the Legislature affirmed its intent, calling on the state departments of Social Services and Health Care Services, OSI, SAWS consortia and counties to meet at least quarterly “with advocates, clients, and other stakeholders” on the project’s development status, and required the state-level entities to connect with stakeholders on “current and planned functionality changes, system demonstrations of public portals and mobile applications,” and identification of areas of concern. The project will likely cost many millions of dollars but it isn’t aimed at creating an entirely new system. Rather, the Legislature explained in AB 1811, the consolidation aims to “heavily leverage” the LRS as a base instead of building a new system. OSI agreed.
“The SAWS single-system strategy will be achieved by aligning technical architecture across the systems, ensuring the functionality meets the needs of all counties, applying the principle of reuse of technology investments through the implementation of shared services, and modernizing CalSAWS as needed in the future,” OSI said in its report. A CalACES Planning Advance Planning Document (PAPD) approved by the federal agency partners and later updated indicated that following migration planning and joint development activities, an analysis of CalACES alternatives and cost benefit, and CalSAWS planning and analysis, plans are to continue activity this year.
In three updates to the PAPD, CalWIN conversion and CalSAWS procurement planning would likely be conducted from January to June 2019, according to the Final Report. In a PAPD update, officials noted that funding for the activities had not yet been approved. A high-level implementation overview indicated core application development and design, along with scrutiny of “ancillaries [systems] determined to be centralized” and data migration could also begin in 2019.
According to the Final Report, the “de facto sequencing scenario” for county migration was for the LRS and L.A. County to migrate first; C-IV counties second and CalWIN counties third – with the CalSAWS application “built off LRS code base.” However, alternatives to that approach have been laid out both in OSI’s 2018 report and in the CalSAWS Final Report. Two alternatives in the Final Report could be considered in lieu of the de facto plan if associated risks can be mitigated or resolved.
"The end goal of the SAWS Single System Strategy is to leverage existing investments into the SAWS systems to create a SAWS single system that meets the needs of the 58 counties, under a county-based governance structure tasked with governing the single CalSAWS, as well as the associated shared services," OSI said in its report.
