SAWS Consortium IV
JPA Board and General Membership Meeting Minutes
November 2-4, 2016
9:00am & 8:30am
Location:Embassy Suites- Napa
Pinot Noir Ballroom
1075 California Blvd.
Napa, CA 94559
Board Members in Attendance:
Region 1Susan von Zabern, Riverside County DPSS Director and Vice Chair
Region 2CaSonya Thomas, San Bernardino County Assistant Executive Officer,Human Services
Region 4Kathy Harwell, Stanislaus County Community Services Agency Director
Region 5Scott Pettygrove, Merced County Human Services Agency Director and Chairperson
Region 6Mike Dent, Nevada County Dept. of Social Services Director
Region 7Eric Nielson, Lassen County Community Social Services Director
Board Member Absent:
Region 3Dena Murphy, Kern County DHS Director
Board Secretary:Thomas Hartman, C-IV Project Director
General Members in Attendance:
Other attendees included County Directors,C-IV Project staff, County staff, CWDA and State Representatives
- Welcome
- Chairperson Scott Pettygrove convened the meeting at 9:27 a.m.
- Public opportunity to speak on any Item NOT on the agenda.
- No public comments.
- Welcome/Overview of Conference
Howard Himes, Napa County Director, welcomed the attendees to Napa. Chairperson Scott Pettygrove provided attendees with a short skit regarding C-IV and the journey this project has been on to get where C-IV is today, which is currently merging with LA County. Tom Hartman went over housekeeping items and welcomed attendees to the 2016 Conference.
Action Items
- Approve Minutes of the September 22, 2016 JPA Board Meeting and Update of Action Items
- No new action items
Motion to Approve the September 22, 2016 JPA Board Meeting Minutes as written was made by Member Eric Nielson.
Motion was seconded by Member Mike Dent.
All present Board Members were in favor.
Member Dena Murphy was absent.
Motion passed unanimously.
Strategic Planning Conference – Thursday, November 3, 2016
- Opening Act – Working as a 40-County Consortium
Scott Pettygrove did a short dialogue with Sheryl Spiller and asked her to share her journey. Sheryl Spiller expressed her gratitude and appreciation to be apart the CalACES family and gave a little background of where she started. Scott Pettygrove talked a little about his journey, the partners throughout and joining with people with common goals. A graphic slideshow was presented with C-IV and LA County respresenting the Brady Brunch Family.
- Guest Speakers
Betty Uzupis gave a brief description of each guest speaker.
Will Lightbourne
Will gave a brief background of when the C-IV/LA County unity occurred and expressed his enthusiasm of the progress made and it is hugely important to the people we serve. Will left the attendees with this thought, if there is something we can take a real sense of accomplishment from in this administration, is that we will have successfully made this transition and migration occur.
John Boule
John gave a brief background of the past migrations and the accomplishments made. Hecongratulated C-IV and LA County on their continuous effort to work together. This is the future of the automation strategy- two consortia automation strategy. He touched on the future, advancement of technology and the current/future endeavors OSI is helping orchestrate. He also emphasized the need for a shared services strategy. OSI is talking to the consortiums about moving forward with a single web portal system.John ended his speech with a little inspiration, hope you all come out of this migration charged and motivated for a very bright future.
Cathy Senderling-McDonald
Cathy opened with “Team work” and how this is not a starting point but a continuation. So much ground work has been made and will be a great project going forward. Cathy touched on John Boule’s point about technology andhow we need to continue to innovate not just for what works today but looking into the future as well. She closed with the marriage analogy and words of encouragement.
Michael Sylvester
A short video was played with Michael introducing himself and his experience, welcoming all attendees, giving a brief update on the LRS system and looking forward to working with them in the near future.
Philip Browning
A short video was played with Philip introducing himself and his role, apologizing for not being in attendance and stating he will see everyone at next year’s conference.
- Regional Introductions
The RPMs from all eight Regions gave a high level presentation on their various counties.
Each Regional Project Manager (RPM) went through introducing the various counties within their region, introducing their JPA Board Member, PSC Member and themselves. They each shared three fun facts that they learned about the counties within their region. In addition, a video was played that documented the RPMs showing various highlights of their regions and counties.
- LRS/C-IV Migration – Governance
Overview
Susan von Zabern gave a brief past reflection of how they started with the development of an MOU describing the overall plan for migration. Antonia Jimenez stated an executive leadership committee was formed and has been working collaboratively to make sure everyone has a voice. The leadership team recognizes continuity is important and because of this the three C-IV leaders currently will remain ongoing participants of this committee. In order to continue to move things forward timely, the executive leadership committee committed to meeting monthly starting January 2014, because there were several critical pieces that needed to happen and needed to be in place in order to make progress toward migration.
JPA Agreement
The original C-IV agreement was approved by the four counties Boards of Supervisors in December 1998. There were amendments made in 2007 and 2010. The newly amended and re-stated JPA Agreement that will be going to the county Boards of Supervisors brings C-IV and LA County together. The executive team has been working together to have as little change as possible to these documents; Phebe reviewed all changes that were made to the JPA Agreement.Red lines will be going to all county counsels to review the differences and discuss any changes they may suggest.
By-Laws/MOU
The legal advisor section has been moved to the By-Laws so that the board can take action by amending the by-laws and designate different counsel when appropriate. Language was inserted dealing with LA’s General Relief program to carry the same weight and consideration as State required policy changes, legal mandates and court orders. References to M&O Committees and special workgroups were removed to so that the Executive Director would be able to form committees as needed to deal with matters. The MOU is the operating document that memorializes how each county is going to do business with the consortia; this document did not receive many significant changes. Truc Moore, LA legal counsel went through the MOU changes. The By-Laws will be approved by the 40-County JPA Board Directors and not each counties legal counsel. Along with a redline version, there is an educational PowerPoint that will accompany the packet. A few questions were asked, comments given and a discussion commenced.
Transition Plan
Composed of two major phases; first is a ramp up phase. First phase, CalACES will adopt the fiscal, legal and operating mode of San Bernardino and create a standard frame work for financial processes. Effective July 2020, CalACES fiscal agent, legal representation and operating mode will transition to Los Angeles County. The consortium planning team put together a plan that lays out the schedule and tasks needed to transition smoothly. The transition plan has been reviewed by the LA Auditor/controller and is in currently under review by San Bernardino. The goal is to have the transition team formed by January 2017.
New CalACES Agreement
The LRS and C-IV agreement structure, service level, hardware and data centers are quite different, so instead of syncing them up into one, we put together a migration contract for migration specific work not including the hardware. The new agreement pulls in the other two existing agreements by reference.
Information Request and Expected Response
The information request is like an RFP that lays out what needs to be done, when, how, cost, etc. Accenture is diligently working on it and has committed to have the response to the executive team by November 17th. There is a two-week period planned to review, form questions and revise the negotiation strategy.
Assignment of Existing Agreements
All the existing agreements (Accenture, First Data, software, hardware, etc.) need to be assigned to the new forty county consortium on or about July 1, 2017. This is action cannot happen any sooner because the new 40 county consortium will not exist until then.
Contract Negotiation Process
The plan for this negotiation is to have one voice and one approach going in to negotiations with Accenture. This is planned to start after the two-week review period, starting in December going through the end of February. OSI has been very much involved in this effort. The core leadership needs to be identified, detailed calendar and process and identify where we are on the key terms and what our bottom line is. Support may be needed by the counties to review the information received from Accenture and give any comments or feedback.
Timeline: Governance Activities
Tom reviewed the governance schedule that included activities from now until July 2017.
Governance Discussion – Questions and Potential Challenges
Scott reiterated to the County Directors that the governance timeline provided is for Directors and is the support structure to help Directors work through the JPA Agreement with their Boards of Supervisors. Truc stated a board letter will be drafted to help summarize the more salient points so they can be quickly drawn out. A question was asked, what will happen if we get to May and there is a county who has not yet approved the JPA Agreement. There is only a 2/3 vote needed to approve the agreement and pass it. If a county chooses not to approve and sign the JPA Agreement they are no longer considered a member of the JPA and would be denied access to the system. Legal Counsel will be conducting road shows along with webinars to help educate staff on the changes being made to the agreement.
- LRS/C-IV Migration – Planning Update
IAPD Update
The latest version if the IAPD was submitted on September 21st with request for federal permission to purchase equipment and system software for the migration project. The CAP was submitted on September 30th and there was a walkthrough of the methodology with state program sponsors. OSI anticipates sign-off from state sponsors next week and submission to CMS mid/late November.
Timeline: Planning Project
June Hutchison reviewed the migration timing and upcoming key events.
FastTrack – Technical Proof of Concept
June opened up the FastTrack topic with sharing that this has already been presented to the executive leadership team as well as the general membership. She gave a brief overview of the difference between the Multiwave approach and the FastTrack option. Scot Bailey talked about how the FastTrack approach everyone switches over at the same time and there is less cost to build temporary infrastructures. He also explained some of the risk behind the FastTrack approach. For instance, since all 40 counties would go live at the same time, there is no opportunity to learn from the 1st or 2nd wave mistakes. The Proof of Concept is in the early stages and C-IV plans to present it at the January General membership. However, currently the 84-hour window (moving all counties to the new system over a 3-day weekend) looks possible. A FastTrack timeline was presented, outlining the timing available before a decision would need to be made.
Foster Care Update
LRS has implemented the foster care functionality on the 24th of October. C-IV has decided not to do a side-by-side but hold a summit at the LRS Project. We will go over current foster care functionality, discuss new and upcoming functionality and share current county processes for foster care. C-IV would like to hold this session in February and will be sending out a CRFI to counties to request participants.
Joint Design
- Scope & Timing
- Committees – Progress
A combined committee structure which includes all 8 regions was implemented in June 2016. The new structure includes co-facilitation by a C-IV/LRS representative.
- Joint Change Control Board
The joint CCB was implemented in August 2016. There was an agreement made that joint design would start no later than release 17.03 (March 2017) and any major effort that occurred before that time would be designed together if possible to minimize migration gaps.
- LRS/C-IV Migration – What to Expect?
Migration Project Timeline
June reviewed the Draft Timing Migration D&I Project Schedule.
Migration Project Organization
June went over the staffing matrix indicating where new positions would be needed and where current positions would be leveraged. June also covered where certain phases of the migration project would take place.
County Participation
County participation will be important and needed. The number of staff and timing will depend on the Implementation Approach. Staffing is needed for the project, participation in design sessions, regional review of system change requests, implementation/change management, UAT, training coordinators/in county support, etc. These positions only last through D&I, when funding endsfor D&ICalACES and the counties will have to redeploy these staff.
- Break
- 2015/2016 Strategic Priorities Update
Overview
Betty shared with the attendees the strategic priorities that were set at last year’s retreat and indicated that different staff will be giving updates and progress on these strategic items.
Pre-Migration – Leverage More from LRS Now
There have been four items identified that could help the C-IV counties to take advantage of LRS features earlier than migration completion and the funding requestto implement these features was approved in September. Two of the items are in design and looking to be out in mid-2017. Medi-Cal Business Intelligence will be implemented in mid to late 2017. The IEVS Automation work will begin very soon.
Task Management
C-IV has been focusing on team based caseloads for the past year. The first changes started occurring in the application in May including changes in the pages modernize them and addcapabilities to search in different ways. In Release 16.09 feedback was received from counties which required some slightly different modifications. Sean went through various functionscoming in the next release. For example, you will be able to use your county terminology to create your task type, counties can create tasks and counties can choose what task they want to use. Sean went through future enhancements planned for task and team management.
Management Reporting
There had been concern that counties feel they must turn to external vendors to supply the management reporting they need. C-IV has been working on this issue and had asked for samples of what counties had to produce externally.C-IV went through all examples and met with various counties and came up with some common themes listed on slide 54. C-IV has broken down the steps they are taking to fix this issue into three steps. Short term steps have already been completed. Medium term steps are in process and will be available in the next six months. Long term steps are not in the near future (next year) but are actively being researched. Sean believes we are getting a lot closer to getting away from outside vendor use and are working in the right direction toward this goal.
Medi-Cal Reporting
With the implementation of Healthcare Reform many new reporting needs have been identified. Multiple reports were created external to the system that have been critical to the counties. This effort is to replace external reporting needs with system generated reports and identify ongoing Medi-Cal reporting needs. Sean went over the different changes that have been implemented in the last several releases.
QC Error Rates
Last year the project went through and identified some outstanding CalFresh SCRs. The C-IV committees prioritized some of these SCRs and implemented five of them over the last year. There is one still outstanding (Verified upon receipt) and C-IV is waiting for CDSS to provide some clarification on that policy and we will proceed forward once that is received. Next steps are to continue to work with our CDSS partners as new policy comes out or policy clarification comes out and work to implement them. Virginia Lugo from CDSS informed that us that FNS is divorcing the new 310 (QC uses to review CalFresh cases). She informed attendees of the new business structure, rules and procedures that FNS has in place currently.2015 QC rates have not been published. FNS is going to review cases out of all our systems and they will assign a QC error rate for 2016 and there will be no official county rate but instead a state rate.