Puerto Rico committees hear bill to create single digital record for people with disabilities

A joint public hearing of the House Government Committee and the Commission on Older Adults and Social Welfare on March 27 examined House Bill 387, a gubernatorial-backed measure to create a single centralized digital record for people with disabilities and to order the Puerto Rico Innovation and Technology Service (PRITS) to build, implement and maintain it.

Supporters said the system should reduce repeated paperwork and speed access to services, while agency officials urged clearer regulatory language, firm protections for privacy and time and budget details before the committee moves the bill forward.

Isabel Salgado Pérez, assistant administrator for administration and finance at the Administration for the Care and Integral Development of Childhood (ACUDEN) in the Department of the Family, said ACUDEN serves about 2,095 children in early-childhood programs and that integrating records would “guarantee the continuity and accessibility of information of services provided over time.” She told the committees that ACUDEN’s current platforms already capture items such as the Avanzando Juntos screening documents and individualized education plans and that the agency is available to contribute data and technical help.

Antonio Ramos Guardiola, executive director of PRITS, said PRITS has begun a discovery phase to catalog which systems hold what data, identify duplications and determine “where the government first sees a datum” so agencies can design workflows to share records. Ramos said PRITS expects to follow industry cybersecurity standards (NIST, ISO 27001) and encryption practices and acknowledged that no system is infallible: “We must also work on safeguards and backups to protect those data.”

Daniel Soto, director of the adults with intellectual disability program at the Department of Health, described clinical and eligibility rules the agency uses and said a shared electronic record would allow clinicians and caseworkers to see prior evaluations and speed determinations of eligibility for adult services. He said the Health Department will begin moving families’ data into the Puerto Rico Early Intervention Data System in May 2025 and that the change could reduce monthslong delays caused when families cannot produce older documents.

The Department of Education’s delegation, including Saraí Ruiz Maisonet, director of public policy, said the department already maintains a special-education platform called MIPE that contains demographic information, individualized education plans (IEPs/PEIs), therapies and related services. MIPE staff said the system can exchange data by API with a centralized platform developed by PRITS.

Representatives of the Administration for Vocational Rehabilitation (ARV) detailed federal eligibility rules that guide their work and cautioned the committee that ARV’s determinations rely on specific clinical and functional documentation. Rosa Lugo Caban, administrator of ARV, said the agency receives an average of about 2,000 transition referrals a year from the Department of Education and that digitized, timely documentation would speed ARV’s 60-day federal deadline for eligibility determinations.

Committee members pressed agencies on implementation details: who will draft the implementing regulations, how long it will take to convert paper files into digital format, and what specific data elements will be shared. Ramos said PRITS and agencies have held initial meetings and that PRITS had conducted two early discovery sessions. Several agency witnesses asked that implementing regulations be exempt from the standard rulemaking timeline in the Uniform Administrative Procedure Act (Ley de Procedimiento Administrativo Uniforme, Law 38 of 2017, LAEPAU) so integration work would not be delayed; PRITS proposed that the regulation be adopted within 180 days of the law’s approval.

Lawmakers repeatedly pressed officials for a fiscal estimate. PRITS asked for 30 days to produce a full cost estimate; the committee chair pressed for an earlier answer, and members requested that agencies submit preliminary fiscal and implementation details to the committee within five days.

On privacy, PRITS and agency IT staff said the design will use encryption in transit and at rest, multi-factor authentication and role-based access controls; all interactions will be logged in an audit trail. PRITS said it follows applicable local and federal rules for protected health information and cybersecurity (citing the law enacted in 2024 on cybersecurity and referencing HIPAA standards), and acknowledged that “millions of attempts” to breach government systems occur annually. Agency witnesses said consent mechanisms will be required in many cases — for example, a parent or guardian authorizing transfer of early-intervention records — and that people who decline to participate would continue to receive services through existing procedures.

Committee members and witnesses gave population figures the committee said it will use to estimate scale: the Department of Education’s child count for special education stood at 96,472 students; ACUDEN reported about 2,095 children in its programs; PRV/ARV reported 37,486 active cases overall with 16,054 transition referrals in recent program years; the Department of Health said Avanzando Juntos attended roughly 4,200 children in the last year and about 800 adults in other programs (about 5,000 combined for that year). The Health Department also reported it is operating community homes and supportive services for hundreds of adults with intellectual disability (agency witnesses gave counts of 82 and 84 homes at different points in testimony). Agencies agreed to provide any missing or more specific counts to the committee.

No formal committee vote or final action on the bill was recorded during the hearing. Committee members said they expect to consider proposed amendments and to move the bill quickly, but requested additional, written details about estimated costs, the scope of regulatory changes and the proposed exemption from LAEPAU before advancing the measure.

What’s next: The committee asked PRITS and the participating agencies for a preliminary fiscal impact and implementation timeline within days of the hearing and signaled that it will incorporate technical and regulatory amendments before printing a committee report.