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DHHS asks for efficiency investments: DocuSign, Medicaid recovery staff and contract reviews discussed
Summary
DHHS defended a DocuSign purchase as cost-saving, sought three additional staff for Medicaid recoveries with a strong return, and discussed contract eliminations and timing for opioid abatement and other grants; committee asked for surplus-statement adjustments tying savings to the requested investments.
Division III heard multiple DHHS operations requests and business cases intended to reduce long-term costs and improve administrative efficiency.
DHHS sought $344,000 for enterprise-wide DocuSign licensing. Ernie Gillen, DHHS IT director, and other department witnesses said DocuSign is already leveraged broadly across divisions for contract execution, AG approvals and Governor and Council reviews; they said electronic execution reduces travel, overtime and missed deadlines for time-sensitive federal funding. The department offered a business-case estimate that roughly 900 agreements processed annually could save an hour and a half each if fully electronic, which would recover the investment in labor savings alone. Committee members asked whether any savings could be captured in the budget as offsets; the department and LBA staff suggested a surplus-statement adjustment to reflect department-wide savings instead of recording the procurement as a pure general-fund spend.
On Medicaid recoveries, DHHS described a legal-services team proposal to dedicate three additional staff to recovery efforts. Department officials said adding staff (estimated first-year cost about $82,000) could conservatively generate $350,000 in additional recoveries; after federal and county shares the net state return was projected at roughly $700,000 in fiscal 2027. Committee members treated the request as a business case likely to pass a cost-benefit test.
Committee staff also described a set of contract eliminations and change items under active review. For several contracts the LBA and DHHS were still assessing multi-year impacts. The chair asked DHHS to provide a list of specific contracts proposed for termination with dollar impacts across both years of the biennium.
Ending: Committee members signaled openness to investments that produce verifiable savings but asked staff to surface any department-wide savings that could be used to make the DocuSign purchase cost neutral via surplus-statement adjustments and requested a detailed contract-by-contract cost impact report.
