Tracking the Spend: State Hospitals’ Top IT Services Purchases Through June

The state department responsible for providing patient care to those mandated by a criminal or civil court judge made 82 purchases of IT services from Jan. 1-June 30 and spent more than $9 million on the top five.

The California Department of State Hospitals (DSH) spent exactly $9,487,190.04 on its five most expensive such purchases, most of it on one project. Here, with rounding, is what that money paid for, based on data in the State Contracting and Procurement Registration System:

• $7,962,000 to CHG-MERIDIAN as part of DSH’s Pharmacy Modernization project, for “hardware, implementation, hardware/software support” and other costs. DSH this year sought and received a reappropriation of $2.7 million from the General Fund – from the 2021-2022 Fiscal Year to the 2022-2023 Fiscal Year – to continue the project’s implementation phase. This is a nearly three-year contract from Jan. 10-Nov. 14, 2024.
• $531,000 to Executive Information for maintenance and support for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Patient Safety Network (PSNet) public safety information systems at four state hospitals. This is a three-year contract from April 17-April 16, 2025.
• $497,000 to Gartner for vocational training. DSH made the purchase May 20.
• $249,000 to Mergent Systems for items related to computer displays. DSH made the purchase June 2.
• $248,000 to Castro International Consulting for implementing a software platform for “managing server certificate instances.” DSH made the purchase June 10.