2022 State HIT Connect Summit

The State of North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) faced an unprecedented health emergency in responding to and managing the COVID-19 pandemic while simultaneously transitioning to Managed Care. The State immediately recognized that data, analytics, and automation supported by agile platforms was critical to overall success. There was also a recognition that these platforms would need to scale in both functionality and utilization as the Pandemic unfolded and the managed care transition progressed. The State chose a number of tools, including a suite of AWS and ServiceNow products, to support the Department’s needs. The AWS platform for COVID was stood up over a weekend, and Accenture was engaged to assess the security of the platform from both an AWS Well-Architected and HIPAA perspective.

To date, the platform has provided the primary repository for all State pandemic related reporting, including reporting for State leadership for pandemic management and externally facing dashboards consumed by citizens from the State’s COVID-19 website and media outlets. As the pandemic progressed, the Department quickly realized the value of the platform, and its utility beyond COVID, specifically for Medicaid. The Department engaged Accenture and Amida to explore the possibilities of a 2.0 version of the platform that would industrialize its scale and functionality, implement broader governance and operational processes, and provide a broader suite of services that would serve all of the Department’s internal customers.

Similar to the evolution of AWS, ServiceNow was originally implemented to enhance Medicaid call center capabilities and was scaled to support a number of functions, including management of Managed Care launch issues with a focus on identifying and resolving potential member harm issues, communications support, and management of launch trends by leadership. Use of the ServiceNow platform continues to expand, both automating and routinizing key management processes.

This session will examine the challenges and opportunities the Department experienced in standing up flexible platforms that could quickly scale to meet changing and varied business needs.