If you get caught speeding this summer and don’t want to pay the bill until fall, you may want to contest your ticket. The state computer that processes those appeals is off line and isn’t booking court dates until October.
There is no such obvious silver lining for health care providers, who take care of Medicaid patients and are dealing with the Department of Health and Human Services new computerized claims system. It hasn’t worked right since the day the state flipped the switch in January and the computer started rejecting bills. Several hundred thousand claims are still in limbo.
Less noticeable to the public, but a big sore point with the Legislature’s Transportation Committee, is the new Bureau of Motor Vehicles computer. About a year ago, it was discovered that $6 million had been spent but nothing was running. Today nearly twice that much has been invested, and BMV offices across Maine were closed Monday so the state could test what it hopes is a system that is two-thirds operational.
In fact, almost every state department has some computer story to tell.
Some are relatively small projects like the Maine Revenue Services system that tracks retail sales by region and category, from building supplies to food and lodging. That report, used by government and business planners, was taken off line earlier this year for a computer program installation and won’t be back until the fall. It is still in its testing phase.
And, the state points out, not all the stories are bad.
The state’s official Web site – at www.maine.gov – won the best of show in 2004 in a national contest against online public information systems in other states. But most projects are expensive, behind schedule, taking a toll on staff and inconveniencing the public.
Things are so busy at the Violations Bureau – where 145,000 tickets are processed annually – the staff now only answers the phones from 8 to 10 a.m. and 2 to 4 p.m. The rest of the time they’re entering data into the new computer and learning to use the system.
Gov. John Baldacci recognizes the state has a problem and has created a new Office of Information Technology that puts all the state’s 500 technology support staff – handling everything from phone lines to computers – under one director, versus having them scattered among various departments. As a backup, the Transportation Committee has asked the newly formed Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability to do an audit of why the state’s computer projects are taking so long to get up to speed.
$6 million and “nothing”
The state’s computer woes hit the headlines about a year ago when it came to light that almost half of a $13 million budget for a new BMV computer had been spent and the system wasn’t even close to being up and running.
“Half the money was spent and nothing worked,” said Secretary of State Matt Dunlap, whose office oversees the BMV.
Dunlap, who was a member of the Legislature when the project started in 2001, said his department was “crossing our fingers,” for the big test on Monday of the largest chunk of that system, which will handle information on 900,000 drivers licenses and driver history. In the next phase, the new computer will take over management of the state’s 1.5 million vehicle registrations.
On Tuesday, Dunlap said there were a few glitches, but the system was up and running.
“It’s working. It’s live and in the air. The landing gear is up. It’s flying,” he said. The old system is still in the shadows and will be used for some functions until the whole system is converted by January 2006. The public, he said, should not notice anything.
“We’re not making our problems their problems,” Dunlap said.
The trouble with the BMV system can be traced back to multiple sources. While the state points to the vendor – Keane of Boston – Rep. Terry McKenney, R-Cumberland, a member of the Legislature’s Transportation Committee, said there’s plenty of blame to go around.
“Nobody knew exactly what they were bidding on,” he said, which was manifest by the “ridiculously low and ridiculously high bids” that came back.
Keane, in fact, is still working with the state on other projects and Mike Scafati, a company spokesperson, said the problems were due to “unexpected complications that occur” with any large project.
“All I can say is I hope it works,” McKenney said last week. “I suspect it’s not really under control.”
The saving grace of the BMV project, according to Dunlap, was his office has kept the old system as a backup until the new system can run on its own.
Complete meltdown
That was not the case with the Department of Health and Human Services, which went live with its Medicaid billing system in January. From day one the system did not work.
Maine Chief Information Officer Richard Thompson, who is director of the new Office of Information Technology, said the biggest lesson learned from the DHHS project, was “don’t shut down the old one until the new one works.”
While that might sound obvious, Thompson didn’t have the authority to implement that rule until now. He was in an advisory-only position, and the department heads essentially did what they wanted.
The pressure was on to get the new system – in the works since 2001 – up and running and to comply with new federal privacy requirements under HIPPA or the Health Insurance Portability and Privacy Act. Those standards, for example, said health providers could no longer use social security numbers as a means of identification, and must use other codes.
The new $22 million system – paid for largely with federal money – also made it tougher to get bills paid because if all the information and new codes aren’t provided by the vendor and filled in properly by DHHS staff, the computer rejects the claim.
“If any one of those things isn’t exact…it says ‘start over’,” Thompson said. “We aren’t making significant headway in the suspended claims.”
“We implemented too early and should have found a way to pilot this system,” he said. “Across the country, these are the most complex government systems you will find.”
His goal with the new technology department is to take the burden of computer project planning off individual department heads and put it with the experts. And, at the very least, “don’t launch until we’re ready…whether we should have been ready or not.”
Processing your tickets
The Violations Bureau, located in Lewiston and operated by the court system, is switching to a new computer in a process Ted Glessner, state court administrator, described as “changing the tire on your car without stopping.”
The courts do not fall under Thompson’s purview.
In order to get the staff trained on the system and give them more time to enter data, it was announced in mid-April that telephone hours would be cut back and the public window would only open from 1 to 3 p.m.
The bureau also decided not to process until the fall those 10 to 20 percent of people who get a traffic ticket and decide to appeal it before the court. Those appeals will be processed in October, Glessner said, when the courts plan to double up on their hearing of such cases.
“Most people aren’t upset if their case is going to be scheduled out into the future,” Glessner said, because in many instances that delays the inevitable – paying the fine.
The Violations Bureau handles all motor vehicle tickets – not including local parking citations – and $15 million in fines a year. The staff is processing paid fines on the new system.
“We don’t leave money hanging around…we get the money in the bank,” Glessner said. The money then goes into the general fund.
He said people’s records would be kept up to date, even if they appeal, and they would not be listed as being delinquent on a fine. “Nothing bad should happen,” Glessner said.
Back to the future
Even as the state grapples to deal with its current computer conversions, new projects are being planned, as more departments find the state’s old mainframe computer inadequate and see ways to do things better with technology.
Secretary of State Dunlap said his next hurdle is a federally funded and mandated centralization of all the registered voters in the state. Right now Maine’s 503 cities and towns have their own lists, but with the new computer system that list will be held in Augusta and linked to computers in each of the municipalities. New federal law requires the centralized lists in every state to guard against voter fraud.
“I’m going to manage this very closely because of our past experiences,” Dunlap said. “It’s absolutely critical that it be successful.”
At Maine Revenue Services, Mike Allen, director of economic research, said the department was given money by the Legislature to look at buying a new tax computer system – a task which makes fixing the retail sales report look tiny by comparison.
Allen said the department plans to hire a consultant “to come in and think about how to develop a new system – whether to upgrade the existing one or scrap it all together – before we start throwing away money.”
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