Industry Insider: A Member Briefing with Ricardo Blanco, CIO for the Texas Health and Human Services System

Texas Health and Human Services (HHS) — which includes the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) and the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) — has hundreds of programs and services that help more than 7 million Texans a month with food, health care, safety, and disaster services.

As the CIO for HHSC, the largest state agency in Texas with an annual budget of over $39 billion, Ricardo Blanco oversees the technology needs of over 40,000 employees and manages an annual IT budget estimated at over $1.2 billion.

HHSC Information Technology received two GovTech Best of Texas awards at the Texas Digital Government Summit on June 1st.  The Riata Migration Project won the Best of Texas Award for IT Collaboration. This project involved relocating over 73 applications and tools and over 400 servers from the Riata Data Center to a state-owned data center supported by the Department of Information Resources.  The State Health Analytics and Reporting Platform (SHARP) won the Best of Texas Award for Best Innovative Use of Data Analytics. SHARP is an enterprise data platform that provides near-term and long-term data management and processing for the Department of State Health Services.