Government Technology - December 2008 - (Page 18)

Your Oddest Searches bigfoot machines stuck in the mud howler monkeys intellectuals virtual hallucination machine software top easiest kids lunches seventeen magazine font president george bush phone number justice war and robots caught naked magician at birthday party Strangest govtech.com searches for 2008. DEC_08 largest budget item in many states and accounts for 22 percent of total state spending, according to the National Governors Association (NGA). Several states use IT strategies to cut Medicaid costs. One example is Tennessee, which detects and tracks a form of Medicaid fraud that was previously invisible. This is due to recent legislation that forces Tennessee pharmacies to report all their prescription drug sales to a centralized database. TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program, can tap its e-prescribing system into that database, said David Beshara, Secretary of State’s office and its effort as a pharmacy director of TennCare. possible template for future projects. Before the legislation, the e-prescribing In 2008, California finished combing through 2 million UCC forms, a process system only forced pharmacies to report prescription drug sales paid for by Medicaid. that involved examining millions more pages because often UCC documents are This loophole aided fraud. An unscrupulous several pages. The agency hired Kindred patient could visit several doctors’ offices Partners to redact the SSNs. and collect prescriptions from all of them, The project’s most significant challenge which the patient then charged to Medicaid. was deciding whether to redact only part However, pharmacies didn’t report drug of the SSNs or all nine digits, said Nicole sales that weren’t paid for by Medicaid, even Winger, deputy secretary of state for comwhen Medicaid paid for the doctor visits that generated the prescriptions. Sometimes, munications at the California Secretary of State’s office. Many title companies insisted patients would pay for doctor visits with that knowing the last four digits of SSNs Medicaid to get drug prescriptions that they purchased at the pharmacy without Medicaid makes narrowing down UCC research much easier. money and then sold to addicts. Before the agency hired a vendor, it TennCare can now spot this fraud using crossed out by hand all but the last four the state’s centralized prescription drug digits. However, some observers pointed transaction database. All purchases are out that tech-savvy identity thieves could now recorded for TennCare, which can run analytics on drugs purchased use an algorithm to decipher the with private money that may entire SSN if they had the last four correlate with Medicaid-paid digits and the person’s birth date. Top 10 Govtech.com doctor visits. If this Medicaid “Our agency’s decision was Readership cost-cutting strategy produces to err on the side of security. If Among savings, look for similar stratesomeone has a court order [for the non-U.S. gies in other states. last four digits] or wants to take it Countries up on an individual basis, we can in 2008 take it from there,” Winger said. 1. Canada Many states are finding vendors to pursue similar projects. STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS 2. India are scrambling to redact Social 3. United Security numbers (SSN) from Kingdom online public documents, such 4. Australia as Uniform Commercial Code FINDING THE MOST EFFECTIVE 5. Philippines way to manage IT projects is an (UCC) documents and tax liens. Naturally concerns endless quest for state and local 6. Germany about identity theft are driving agencies. However, Vivek Kundra, 7. Ireland CTO of the District of Columbia, these efforts. Many states are 8. Malaysia believes he may have done just that. looking at the California Dash to Redact Taking Stock Kundra manages his technology projects like a stock portfolio, treating each IT project like a publicly traded stock. The approach received much attention during state and local government IT events in 2008. He has five “fund managers,” each of whom focuses on one of five aspects of government — education, public safety, health care, government operations and economic development. Kundra and Mayor Adrian Fenty then decide what projects to hold, buy and sell. “In your personal life, would you continue investing in a stock that you knew was tanking? Unfortunately in the public sector, we allow that to happen,” Kundra said. The stock portfolio approach has already saved millions of dollars, according to Kundra. He slashed $3 million in spending by eliminating a redundant project in the D.C. Public Vivek Kundra Schools. The district also saved $4.6 million when Kundra sank an enterprise intranet initiative after he noticed the city already had a parallel project. Though Kundra’s rough-and-tumble Wall Street management approach was successful, he said it initially prompted backlash from employees. “We moved from a culture that was built around feelings, relationships, who you knew, and making sure we were protecting jobs rather than the interest of the public and taxpayer dollars, to a culture in which we focused on results, accountability, and making sure we got the most out of the investments we made. That created a lot of friction,” Kundra said. The stock portfolio management approach also helps Kundra when he’s forced to fire an employee. The stock portfolio approach gives him a detailed paper trail to support the termination. “It allows you to monitor people and performance on a daily basis rather than on an annual basis,” Kundra explained. 18 9. Singapore 10. 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Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - December 2008

Government Technology - December 2008 Contents Point of View Four Questions for... On the Scene Big Picture Year in Review Who Controls Your Network? Paper Makes a Comeback Halting Meth Abuse Spectrum Up Close signal:noise Digital Communities Contents Becoming a Digital Community Rethinking 700 MHz Smart Grids: Powering the Future Gearing Up for Crime 2.0 Software Predicts Crime Local Portals on the Red Carpet More Than Just a Pretty Face

Government Technology - December 2008

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