One of the largest departments in Texas, HHSC has $39.31 billion across a wide-ranging swath of health issues in 2022-2023.
Optimized technology and data-driven decision-making will be required to meet its vision. For the latest calendar year, 2021, for example, the commission spent $181.38 million on IT alone.
What follows are snippets of the HHSC’s four goals from its website, with some minor edits. To make progress toward the commission’s core goals and the governor’s statewide objectives, the department sets out the following:
Goal 1: Improve and support health outcomes and well-being for individuals and families.
Objective: Enhance quality of direct care and value of services.
- Implement quality of care and cost efficiency benchmarks for managed care organizations (MCOs) participating in Medicaid and CHIP. (September 2022)
- Implement a STAR+PLUS Pilot Program to test the delivery of fee-for-service long-term services and supports through the managed care model. (September 2023)
- Improve survival rates for women diagnosed with breast or cervical cancer by reducing application processing times by approximately three days by digitizing the Medicaid for breast and cervical cancer application form to start Medicaid treatment earlier. (January 2024)
- Promote the community attendant role by expanding workforce development opportunities for attendant-like positions, including at the regional and local level. (December 2024)
- Prevent illness and promote wellness through public and population health strategies.
Objective: Engage older adults.
- Assess and grow social engagement opportunities for older adults by expanding program options, such as the Know Your Neighbor campaign, by 10 percent. (January 2025)
Objective: Address opioid harm.
- Reduce negative health outcomes for opioid use by increasing the number of successful opioid overdose reversals by 20 percent. (August 2025)
Objective: Mental health first-aid training.
- Increase mental health first-aid training sessions by 20 percent. (August 2025)
Objective: Encourage self-sufficiency and long-term independence.
- Increase the number of family violence survivors served from 15,398 to 17,500. (August 2023)
Goal 2: Ensure efficient access to appropriate services.
Objective: Empower Texans to identify and apply for services.
- Expand the current Community Partner Program from 187 counties to all 254 counties to ensure the program benefits Texans statewide. (September 2022)
- Increase the participation in the WIC program by 5 percent, or 34,000 clients, to improve health outcomes for both mothers and young children. (August 2027)
Objective: Provide seamless access to services for which clients are eligible.
- Extend postpartum coverage period to six months for Medicaid for Pregnant Women to further reduce adverse postpartum health outcomes. (November 2022)
- Transition Healthy Texas Women from fee for service to managed care to enhance continuity of care and increase access to preventive health care and breast and cervical cancer services. (November 2024)
- Increase the number of available beds by 40 percent in the state hospital system through construction and staffing of additional capacity. (August 2027)
Objective: Ensure people receive services and supports in the most appropriate, least restrictive settings, considering individual needs and preferences.
- Demonstrate improved quality of care provided to approximately 2,600 residents of the state supported living centers. (August 2027)
- Launch a new individualized skills and socialization service to replace day habilitation to increase community access, increase supports to achieve competitive, integrated employment, and provide greater choice and control over service delivery and personal resources. (March 2023)
- Increase access to behavioral health services for children served by Child Advocacy Centers of Texas by 10 percent, or an additional 2,360, for a total of 25,969 children served. (August 2023)
- Improve the quality of care for children with disabilities and developmental delays by increasing the retention rate of personnel who deliver early intervention services by 5 percent. (August 2027)
Objective: Strengthen consumers’ access to information, education and support.
- Redesign the 211 Texas interactive voice response to enrich customer service and to increase by 10 percent the number of customers who receive the information they want without being transferred to a customer call center agent. (January 2023)
- Implement universal screening for service member status to allow for aggregate reporting and planning to improve person-centered referrals and service member outcomes. (August 2025)
Goal 3: Protect the health and safety of vulnerable Texans.
Objective: Optimize preparation for and response to disasters, disease threats and outbreaks.
- Implement an emergency broadcast system across the Regulatory Services Division (RSD) to allow program areas to send emergency notifications, request feedback from providers and provide reporting capability. (August 2027)
Objective: Prevent and reduce harm through improved education, monitoring, inspection and investigation.
- Enhance the focus on high-risk facilities when planning and conducting on-site audits, inspections, investigations and reviews. (January 2024)
- Reduce the number of recurring serious violations in nursing facilities, acute care facilities and child-care operations by 5 percent through consistent and efficient processes for licensing, surveying and enforcement. (August 2026)
- Increase capacity in child daycare operations by 5 percent through community engagement activities aimed at identifying individuals who need to be regulated as well as individuals who want to provide child care, which will strengthen health and safety protections for children in out-of-home care. (August 2026)
Goal 4: Continuously enhance efficiency and accountability.
Objective: Promote and protect the financial and programmatic integrity of HHSC.
- Establish a complex contracts audit team to identify and audit vendors of high-risk contracts to determine whether vendors complied with key financial and programmatic contract provisions. (March 2024)
- Defend against cybersecurity threats to protect agency assets and citizens’ confidential data. (August 2027)
- Increase detection of potentially fraudulent SNAP claims by 10 percent. (December 2024)
- Adopt administrative rules to expand the agency's use of group purchasing organizations to realize improved efficiencies in procurement operations, faster lead times and overall cost savings to the agency and the state. (September 2023)
Objective: Strengthen, sustain and support a high-functioning, efficient workforce.
- Improve services to clients of state facilities by strengthening staffing through improved recruitment, hiring processes and training. (August 2025)
- Conduct an agencywide market salary data analysis and increase salaries of certain health and 16 human services employees in critical, hard-to-fill positions with high turnover and vacancy rates. (December 2022)
Objective: Continuously improve business strategies with optimized technology and a culture of data-driven decision-making.
- Apply advanced data analysis techniques to quickly identify trends and outliers for audits, inspections, investigations and reviews. (September 2023)
- Implement or enhance the functionality of information technology systems to improve efficiencies in processing requisitions and managing, monitoring and reporting contracts for the agency. (August 2025)
- Modernize the Texas Medicaid Enterprise System, a highly complex network of interconnected systems that support Texas’ Medicaid delivery system, to increase efficiencies and better support the managed care model. (September 2023)
- Enhance the value of data by establishing policies to document data management/data stewardship roles and responsibilities required to enable clean, consistent data across HHSC sources and systems. (September 2023)
- Provide technology, tools and automation for curated or self-service data analytics and reporting, in coordination with the Data Governance and Performance Management Council. (December 2024)
