ECI Migrates Legacy Application to Current Microsoft Technologies

In 1984, counties in California began reporting individual mental health client and service data through the Department of Mental Health’s Client Data System (CDS).  This reporting was initiated as a result of Budget Act language requiring information to meet the needs of the DMH and the state legislature as well as to provide general information about the public mental health systems in California. The scope of the CSI system includes the entire California public mental health population of approximately 500,000 people who receive over 10 million services per year.  Submission of CSI client information is required upon a client’s first contact with each county, and service information is submitted as services occur.

Previous to the project, DMH staff had developed and implemented an interactive Decision Support System (DSS) that provides analysts the ability to run ad-hoc queries and extract statewide and county CSI statistical information to meet Managed Care program operational requirements.  Future enhancements included DMH’s DSS linkages between CSI data and state hospital data.

DMH identified budget reduction requirements that create the need to reduce data processing costs wherever possible.  The CSI system was costing DMH about $28,000 per month in mainframe batch data processing costs at HHSDC.  To meet the budget requirements, DMH decided to redesign the CSI batch system to eliminate or greatly reduce HHSDC CSI processing and the associated expense.

ECI was contracted to develop a new client/server based CSI application performing the same functionality as the existing mainframe-based batch CSI application.  The size and scope of the project included: 

• The product interfaces were to remain the same - eg Decision Support System (DSS).
• The project involved re-engineering CSI Natural/Adabas products currently in production on the HHSDC mainframe.
• The project involved re-engineering the batch system which involved redevelopment of Job Control Language (JCL) into more modern stored procedures and .NET application code.
• The project was a collaborative development effort that involved ECI and State staff.

Benefits

• Reengineered the DMH mainframe-based CSI system to reduce CSI processing costs by 85%.
• Reengineered the CSI system at a cost that, in combination with the cost of operating the current system during re-engineering/development, did not exceed $360,000 for the following fiscal year saving the department over $100,000/year.
• Provided all current functionality on a single platform which proved to be more flexible regarding future changes to federal reporting requirements.

ECI provided services during the entire lifecycle of the project that included deliverables such as;  Project Plan, Feasibility Study Report, System Documentation, Batch System Testing, Application Released to Production.  ECI was also involved with weekly status meetings, Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions, and Bi-weekly meetings that were held with upper management to provide an update of project progress and issues.  ECI provided onsite maintenance and support of system for 1 full year after system went live.