That was the big takeaway from a briefing exclusive to Industry Insider — California members on Thursday in Sacramento. CDPH CIO John Roussel, Chief Technology Officer Tony Tran and Chief Technology Innovation Officer Vivek Kaushal spoke with a full room about the Future of Public Health initiative, how the agency has changed since the hectic early days of the pandemic and how it views emerging technology such as AI.
Below are five key points they touched on.
1. CDPH IS MOVING TOWARD MORE CENTRALIZED IT
The agency has a history of siloes, Roussel said. Part of that is because it has more than 20 cost centers and 50-plus funding streams which can’t necessarily be commingled, and part of it is because the agency’s work is wide-ranging and involves many specialized experts.
“We had to build all these siloed applications because we cannot share [costs] between the 24, 25 different centers,” Tran said. “So that is the most challenging thing working at CDPH. However, the Future of Public Health is changing that.”
The ethos of the agency is shifting, he said, to one of reusing technology and creating opportunities for common learning.
“That doesn’t work for everything,” Roussel said. “There [is] stopgap stuff we need, programming stuff today, and some of these core capabilities won’t be for years just because we either don’t have the resources or have to pick one, or we’re not there. So we are fine with doing stopgap solutions knowing that we’ll have a larger end goal in mind for a core capability that we’ll move to.”
2. A NEW GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK
The Future of Public Health initiative has created a three-tiered governance process that the agency is using to examine IT requests, which has led to greater scrutiny of whether it can adopt enterprise solutions instead of individual solutions for different groups of users.
“At the highest tier, we have — it’s not an IT governance process, it’s a business IT governance process, and I say ‘business’ first because our directorate is on that and makes the decisions,” Roussel said. “IT is a part of that, I sit on that board, but I don’t have a vote. All my stuff is giving them information to make a decision.”
The agency hopes this will cut down on budget change proposals that are very similar to each other, and allow it to better weather budget storms.
“We are starting to think about solutions in that respect, and that allows us to also not be that much impacted by the upturns and downturns of the budget fights, because these are easily doable conversations, we can sustain multiple programs,” Kaushal said.
3. EVALUATING PLATFORMS
CDPH has recently identified Microsoft as its “preferred platform.”
“We created a criterion rubric to assess all our platforms … to determine time to market, cost, scalability, agility, security — the whole thing,” Roussel said. “And then we weighed everything against it that we currently have in our environment, and this is how we determined that Microsoft happened to be our preferred platform.”
But that doesn’t mean CDPH is closed off to other technology. Roussel said that rubric will come in handy for evaluating other technology.
4. MOVING FORWARD WITH AI
Roussel said the agency is very interested in new technology but is moving with appropriate caution on AI.
“We’re really trying to take it slow, but like I said look for high-value, very very very low-risk things that we can do, and one of the reasons why we want to do this is we want to have trust in AI as we go forward,” he said. “If we let something out that … has wrong information, we’re going to lose trust immediately … and then our efforts can’t go forward.”
Mindful of the California Department of Technology’s role in guiding AI use, CDPH has drafted an AI framework which it’s pitching to leadership, but Tran said it’s not available for review yet and there’s no timeline for its release.
5. FORTHCOMING OPPORTUNITIES
CDPH is “looking a few years down the road” in terms of planning for upcoming procurements, Roussel said.
Much of that is guided by the Future of Public Health initiative, but a few specific areas he mentioned that will need IT work include licensing, surveillance systems and vital records. Roussel said the agency also envisions a single CDPH web portal with a bot available immediately upon entry that can assist visitors with finding the right pages and guiding them through processes, including taking down information and reusing it multiple times as needed.
AI is also likely to bring new opportunities as CDPH identifies use cases. Roussel specifically pointed to the agency’s use of AI to help answer audit questions for agencies willing to accept that kind of engagement.
