The contract to outsource B.C.’s Medical Services Plan and PharmaNet administration comes to an end in three years. This seems like a long time, but the contract includes projects that might make a 2020 deadline challenging.
Maximus B.C., the B.C. office of a U.S.-based company, assumed administration of the MSP and PharmaNet in 2005. The company took over the programs’ operations and information technology, and transformed business processes and procedures.
Since 2005, service levels have improved. Claims for health services provided by B.C. doctors are processed and paid much more promptly, and new B.C. residents are screened and enrolled in MSP and PharmaNet more quickly.
In 2005, Maximus also committed to replacing the outdated information systems that underpin the two programs. But when the original 10-year contract was extended to 15 years in 2013, the language changed.
Wording shifted from “replacing” the outdated systems to “supporting PharmaNet modernization.” The new objective is more limited and, for the additional $264 million B.C. taxpayers are paying for the new contract’s longer term, more realistic.
Outdated information systems are problems governments and some large corporations across Canada face. Some of the critical systems used, for example, to process public health-care claims and payments, manage court records, track and pay social and family benefits, distribute, monitor and record utilities, and so on, are antiquated, putting governments and the public at risk.
Built in the 1980s and ’90s using industry-standard computer platforms and software languages of the time, these complex, custom-built systems were state of the art in their heyday. But new technologies and languages have since emerged, and not all systems have kept up. Universities no longer teach the old methods, and fewer and fewer programmers learn, use or know how to code, for example, those software languages.
The advancing obsolescence increases the cost of maintaining the older systems. Large data-management companies are paid handsomely to store the information, keep it safe, keep it more or less accessible, run reports, code patches and apply new software rules as needed.
Running a single report on historical data can cost $50,000, with more zeros added on to the end of that number according to the complexity of the request. These kinds of contracts help keep IBM, CGI and other companies busy here in Victoria, provide bread-and-butter revenue to corporate coffers, and employ specialists who know the near-obsolete software languages.
Original documentation for large, complex systems provides roadmaps to the original coding that later programmers can trace, follow and fix, as needed. With each passing year, each new update, each new patch put in place to fix glitches, and each new or revised rule applied to a system, documentation becomes more important — especially as, over decades, dozens or even hundreds of people will have contributed to the systems.
The jumble of patches and rules and so on make those old systems unwieldy, inflexible, unscalable, ever more expensive to maintain and work with, and in some cases unstable. In effect, the systems that underpin many government records and program processes in Canada sit on the edge of technological precipices.
Even applying simple patches can present risk of catastrophic failure in some systems. Failure means system crashes, data breaches and extended service shutdowns.
Shifting the systems to modern platforms and then replacing them would cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. The additional $264 million of the 2013 B.C.-Maximus contract covers the base services of the original contract to March 2020, rolling out the new B.C. Services Card, in addition to (merely) supporting PharmaNet modernization.
The total cost of successfully modernizing, then replacing PharmaNet will be much higher. Replacing MSP — older, larger, more complicated, more unwieldy — will be higher yet.
That kind of investment needs widespread support in government circles, especially in times of fiscal restraint.
Even in election years, when government money flows more readily, support is problematic. Talk of such background systems doesn’t stir the blood. It neither engages citizens nor gets out the vote … until something breaks. Then, everyone notices.
Let’s not wait that long.
