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.
