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Tens of Millions Are Part of Agency's Budget Request for Modernization

These requests are part of a plan to enhance data-driven decision-making for public service.

As a human-centered organization touching millions of lives, one key state agency seeks to optimize technology and create more streamlined processes to enhance services.

Texas Health and Human Services (HHS), like other agencies, has been working on the state budget process for months. Submitting a Legislative Appropriations Request (LAR) is one step and includes regularly expected funding but also includes exceptional requests, such as one-time IT purchases or longer-term projects.

Exceptional items requests were recently reported by the Legislative Budget Board (LBB), one of the agencies to which all state agency budget planning is submitted. The 2024-25 Exceptional Items – Initial Agency LAR Submissions lists agencies with biennial appropriations above $40 million.

The agency's exceptional IT and technology requests in the report include:
  • Cyber secure compliance and operations monitoring, $30.7 million
  • Application modernization, $33.5 million
  • PMAS cloud data analytics platform, $13.9 million

HHS has the largest budget and has been continuously modernizing data systems, including a recent complex system migration. CIO Ricardo Blanco recently noted that the agency serves some 7.5 million Texas residents and supports 40,000 state and local customers.

“We have a lot of data and organization. So if I can use an example ... if you took all the data, it would reach the Milky Way and back twice,” Blanco said. “Just a little tidbit of information.”

The agency by the numbers, according to Blanco:
  • 120 websites
  • 220 lines of business
  • 67,000 monthly help desk calls and emails
  • 1,700 employees and employee contractors
  • 5.65 million medication recipients
  • 18,000 people receiving temporary assistance
  • 3.35 million supplemental nutrition program recipients
  • 11 state hospitals

The budget planning process takes four phases:
  • Planning and proposal
  • Legislative action
  • Review and approval by the comptroller and governor
  • Implementation and monitoring

Strategic planning kicks off the process and was submitted in June. HHS strategic planning includes the objective to “continuously improve business strategies with optimized technology and a culture of data-driven decision-making.”

Improvements listed with target dates include:
  • Apply advanced data analysis techniques to quickly identify trends and outliers for audits, inspections, investigations and reviews, September 2023. 
  • 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 HHS 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. 
  • 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.
Rae D. DeShong is a Dallas-based staff writer and has written for The Dallas Morning News and worked as a community college administrator.