2022 State HIT Connect Summit

The COVID pandemic created unprecedented challenges for government agencies. To attack the pandemic, state health agencies mobilized and delivered new programs and solutions at a pace unseen in recent history. While being asked to deliver faster than ever before, these agencies also faced the challenge of increasing threats against cyber security. In this session, Danielle Alvarez, Accenture Public Service Security Lead for the State of Florida, and Will Armstrong, Information Security Manager for the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), will present two examples of how states made meaningful changes to bolster their enterprise security architectures and solutions to protect and safeguard sensitive state data.
Florida
AHCA will present on the Security efforts for the current Florida Medicaid Transformation project (FX), including the strategic vision for building an Enterprise Security Plan that integrates security into the very fabric of a complex, multi-stakeholder critical service for Florida’s constituents. This vision is leveraging the Cloud to rapidly move to a purpose-built, highly agile platform that will transform the way AHCA serves it Medicaid recipients. AHCA and Accenture are focused on ensuring the right blend of security with business agility, while adhering to CMS standards. Current efforts are targeted on aligning an ecosystem of integrators, providers, and other external stakeholders to better serve Florida constituents.
Kansas
Danielle will present on a recent security project with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE). Accenture supported KDHE in designing a secure journey to the Cloud, demonstrating strict compliance to MARS-E 2.0 and applicable policies and regulations. The team documented a comprehensive System Security Plan (SSP), detailed security design and related CMS required artifacts. In January 2020, the team successfully migrated a very complex legacy on-premise environment to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Government Cloud. Danielle will share the approach KDHE took to migrate their infrastructure and security capabilities to the Cloud. She will discuss decisions and components of the project approach that supported success, key challenges and lessons learned, and considerations for other states seeking to maintain security as they migrate platforms to the Cloud.