State IT innovations honored in annual awards

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers on Tuesday honored more than a dozen states for achievements in technology in its annual State IT Recognition Awards.

The honorees are being celebrated for improvements to how digital services are delivered, strengthening cybersecurity postures, streamlining business processes, and collaborating across jurisdictional boundaries. NASCIO chose the winners from more than 120 submissions, and announced them at its annual conference in New Orleans. Many states are repeat winners from last year’s awards.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services received a special recognition award for its work to enhance the benefits experience. The state has automated what were traditionally “manual and labor-intensive application processing” for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The system simplifies benefit administration for the 1.4 million SNAP recipients in the state and allows employees to focus on “higher-value activities” while maintaining accuracy.

The initiative also includes an application tracker, which gives residents more insight into how things are progressing and reduces client calls to the help desk.

Ohio won two awards this year: the Business Process Innovations Award for its Innovation in a Loop initiative and the Data Management, Analytics and Visualization Award for its data dashboard on nursing home quality, known as Navigating Uncharted Waters.

The first effort is designed to move Ohio’s Medicaid-dependent residents through what the state calls “seamless annual renewal processes without human intervention,” enabling automatic reenrollment. Ohio said it has meant uninterrupted access to Medicaid for 85% of households that rely on the benefits—up from between 15% and 50% prior to 2022—and saved caseworkers from manually processing more than 2 million household renewals since the project’s inception.

It initially started as a COVID-era initiative to prevent Medicaid recipients from unknowingly losing access to benefits when programs started to unwind once the worst of the pandemic was over. That unwinding could have meant “surges in caseloads, capacity to communicate, and unnecessary returned mail,” the state said.

The other Ohio initiative honored draws on nearly 70 data points from the state and federal government, as well as two satisfaction surveys, to provide information on nursing homes in the state. In partnership with several agencies, the Ohio Department of Aging developed a dashboard to let users review data on nursing home quality, map locations, and share those results with their friends and family. It came after a task force found that 68% of residents said they did not have enough information to make decisions about their loved ones’ future, and that information they did find was spread out across multiple sources.

Both North Carolina and Massachusetts were honored for modernizing digital services. North Carolina received an award for the rapid modernization of its unemployment insurance program, and Massachusetts’ Commonwealth Digital Roadmap was recognized for its efforts to provide digital experiences that meet all resident’s needs.

Like many states, North Carolina modernized its tax administration and collection systems with funding from the U.S. Department of Labor. It used the money to improve transparency, add self-service capabilities, go paperless and create a more flexible system that can quickly implement any changes in the law. At an event earlier this year, Raju Gadiraju, the North Carolina Division of Employment Security’s chief information officer, said the agency is going through “continuous evolution.”

“It's not a one-time deal,” he said at the time. “It's just not enough to say you’ve modernized it.”

Massachusetts, meanwhile, developed a roadmap designed to provide simpler, secure digital experiences for residents by “managing a single constituent identity across state services, tracking progress of their requests and transactions, streamlining communications across all channels, providing more personalized and accessible experiences, and making up-to-date information and data about state services available online.” 

State leaders say agencies have already rolled out single sign-on capabilities, a multilingual chatbot and other initiatives.

Hawaii received an award in the Emerging and Innovative Technology category for its use of a geospatial decision support system to prepare for emergencies, while Minnesota won the cybersecurity prize for integrating a cyber risk quantification tool that translates possible threats into business terms with data-driven metrics. That has helped state leaders better understand cyber risks associated with certain products.

Iowa won the Cross-Boundary Collaboration and Partnerships prize to modernize its debt collection process, which many governments rely upon in the state, including its judiciary systems and community colleges. Georgia took the honors in the Information Communications Technology category for Orchard, its comprehensive web design system that provides continuity across its more than 100 state websites and applications.

And Tennessee took the prize for Enterprise IT Management Initiatives for streamlining its approach to the tools and processes used by TennCare vendors, which runs Medicare and other health care programs in the state.

Several individual state leaders were honored for their efforts too. NASCIO gave three people the State Technology Innovator Award: Oregon Chief Data Officer Kathryn Darnall Helms; Missouri Deputy Chief Information Officer Paula Peters; and Washington Chief Technology Officer Nick Stowe. 

Meanwhile, Virginia Chief Information Security Officer Michael Watson received the Thomas M. Jarrett State Cybersecurity Leadership Award.