Gena Freeman Article Critique #1

The Chicago Department of Public Health receives two-thirds of it’s annual $200 million budget from grants given by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while the other one-third is funded by Chicago’s corporate budget allocated to the department. The rigorous process of managing grants, and allocating them to different parts of the medical field across Chicago used to be a cumbersome process that could only be done by tedious manual labor. This out-dated system was very susceptible to error and in most cases CDPH officials ignored the budget granted by the city as well as misplaced much needed grant money. As of April 2008 this cumbersome process has been replaced by new grant management system software that integrates the health department’s grant and finance units with the shared services and organizations. With the old system quickly disappearing there are less and less misplaced grant funds. Carlo Govia, CDHP’s first deputy commissioner and CFO says “We were never in the position to forecast the effectiveness of spending”. A great portion of grant money went unspent when it could have been allocated to hospitals across the greater Chicago area. The ineffectiveness of the public health system, in 2006, left 10% of grant dollars unspent that could have been used for vaccinations, awareness, and greater emergency preparedness. These unspent grand dollars were not recycled through out the years; they were returned to the cities budget. This is why the implementation of a new system for grant money was imperative. Important money was being dwindled away each year that could have gone to the improvement of the health care system and saved more lives than were saved that year.

The city only grants a specific amount of money each year to be used to work at preventing diseases such as H1NI and HIV AIDS, which makes it critical that the money be used wisely. The old methods consisted of tedious spreadsheets made each year allocating expenses, but this method was proved very inefficient and inaccurate because it focused too much on the financial aspects of the health department rather than the innovation of medicine. This new system integrates the processes overseen by the financial team with the process implemented by the grant people. “We’ve moved away from silos of grants to a fully integrated system”, says Carlo Govia. The bigger picture of where to allocate the grant money is now apparent. “The system consists of programs such as CA Clarity, for grant applications, awards, and closeout management and Appian software for procure-to pay workflow of requisitions”. There also are a number of Microsoft programs dedicated to enhancing this new system. The system allows the cities annually allocated budget for CDPH and the grant money from agencies to be integrated into one system. Managing these two financial accounts as one gives CDPH a better picture of what is available to spend without having to manually sort through piles of paperwork. This innovation is now leaving time to work on these medical challenges such as H1NI and HIV/Aids as well as emergency preparedness. Before the objective of the CDPH was not fully aimed at the innovation of medical technology/ discoveries, but on how to manage the budget. I believe that these kinds of systems are imperative to the medical industry because the goal of medicine is to save lives not to focus on financial issues regarding grant money. With this Chicago Public Health Department discovery many other cities across the nation can adopt this same method that would tremendously help with further innovations and discoveries in the medical industry. To be effective in today’s world newly developed systems have to be discovered to restore old methods.

McGee, Marianne. "Grants System Helps Chicago Control Public Health Spending." Information Week. Web.