Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Human Resource Management Selects MITEM to Offer Web-Based Services to State Employees

Deployment Establishes First Phase of Integrated Data Sharing Between Government Agencies in the State

The EmployeeDirect Web site allows some 120,000 Virginia state employees and retirees access to their health care and benefits programs and the ability to make changes to those programs. Changes entered by employees on the EmployeeDirect Web site are updated in real-time via MitemView to the DHRM databases that reside on a Unisys mainframe. This automated process eliminates approximately 7 to 10 solid days of data entry that is normally required at the end of each yearly open enrollment period.

DHRM is responsible for Virginia’s system of human resources management. DHRM serves numerous constituents who rely upon the Agency for advice, guidance, and assistance. The Department's primary constituents are the Governor—including his Cabinet and staff—state agencies, legislators and their staffs, employees, citizens, and local government officials. The vision put forth by DHRM is “to provide leadership in human resources management, which is responsive to the goals and needs of the Commonwealth of Virginia and its work force.”

DHRM was under mandate to comply with The Governor’s Executive Order 65 (2000) which states: “…technology must also be applied to make government operate more efficiently and to allow state employees to become more productive…" Health benefits information was the perfect example of the type of information that needed to be easily accessible to State employees and retirees. “To do this we needed a product that could adapt to different platforms and applications, and let us deploy distributed services – Web services. MITEM has successfully met those requirements,” stated Belchior Mira, CIO for DHRM.

Previously, employees who wanted to enroll or make changes to their health benefits during open enrollment were required to fill out a health enrollment form or waiver form. Employees would have to go to their respective Human Resource office, get the correct form and then usually take it home to talk over the issues with their families. They would then have to return the completed forms to the HR office. A benefits administrator would subsequently key the information into the legacy system, and files would be sent to the various insurance carriers to update their systems, produce new identification cards, and process claims. It used to take 3 to 4 weeks to complete this process and make the employee change effective.

MITEM won the DHRM contract after a successful proof of concept (POC) demonstration. For the POC, a MITEM consultant was given data from three sources: health benefits, the personnel system, both of which are on the same Unisys mainframe, and workers' compensation data from an Oracle database on UNIX. “MITEM brought everything together by employee identification into one Web page in less than 2 days. From this demonstration we immediately saw the advantage of MitemView and how it would work perfectly for the EmployeeDirect project. That is why we got MitemView, and why we are very happy with it,” remarked Mira.

DHRM anticipates that by the end of August 2002 the first phase of a project will be in place that will use MitemView to integrate its Unisys mainframe applications with an IBM mainframe application at the Virginia Retirement System (VRS). VRS manages payroll for state retirees with a program called VIPER. VRS and DHRM share data and update their legacy systems when changes are made to retiree’s payroll and benefits programs.

“Originally we were thinking about creating a batch file that we would send back and forth to update and reconcile our respective systems, but we realized that this would be too complicated. After the initial POC I thought that we could use MitemView to resolve the reconciliation and data integrity issues that existed between our two agencies. There are often transactions that take place on our system at DHRM that need to update the VRS system and vice-versa. These transactions will be automatically executed on both systems by an application running on a MitemView server. If both transactions are successful, and the integrity is maintained, then the reconciliation is made on the spot, in real-time,” stated Mira.

Mira expressed a vibrant optimism that this project between DHRM and VRS will open the door for other agencies in the state to begin plans for integrating their systems and enabling real inter-agency data sharing. “With this project we are creating a small snowball that is going to grow more and more. Once we start effectively sharing data between government agencies, the benefits will be many. Imagine, on a simple level, if you could enter your change of address only once via a Web browser and after you were identified in all the different systems, your new information would be automatically updated. We know this can be accomplished with MitemView,” said Mira.

About Virginia Department of Human Resource Management

The Department of Human Resource Management develops and oversees the Commonwealth of Virginia state's system of human resources management. DHRM is responsible for personnel management information systems for state agencies and for health benefits administration. Approximately 60 percent of the agency's budget supports administration of health benefits and employee assistance programs, managing the state employee compensation and classification plan and maintaining a computer system for employee data. The employee health benefits program covers approximately 180,000 state employees, retirees and their dependents. In addition, more than 200 local jurisdictions have chosen to provide health benefits to their employees through the Department's Local Choice health benefits program.

Contact:

Virginia Dept. of Human Resources Mgmt.
Belchior Mira
CIO, Commonwealth of Virginia
Department of Human Resource Management
(804) 225-2203
bmira@dhrm.state.va.us

MITEM Corporation
Andy Nelson
650.323.1500
pr@mitem.com

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