Le ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux du Québec

CGI gives Quebec’s Department of Health a shot in the arm!

In the early 1990s, le ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux du Québec (Quebec’s Department of Health) launched a major change to how it managed health and social services in the province. Its objective was to entrust to its 17 new regional boards entire regional management responsibilities, which included the management of their budgets, health establishments and affiliated social services. To ensure it was equipped with a technological infrastructure that would support this objective, it turned to CGI for support. What resulted was the Système budgétaire et financier régionalisé (SBFR) or regionalized budgetary and financial system.

The Challenge
For CGI, the challenge was considerable. The company would play a decisive role in the revamping of the financial system of one of the government’s largest departments in order to integrate into it the daily operations of the regional boards. This would encompass all of the essential parameters, including, for example, resource envelopes, loan monitoring and performance indicators. In short, the department had to incorporate the regional boards into its financial and budgetary system, ensure the boards maintained constant contact with the central system, and integrate all of their operations.

Implementing secure and highly functional daily bi-directional data transfer activities would allow all establishments to be integrated into a single network. And in the health and social services domain, where information is highly sensitive, the interchange system had to be exceptionally reliable.

Managing the operating system, controlling data integrity, administering data from different SBFR bases, and creating interfaces that could be used with Windows combined to constitute a major technological challenge for the CGI team. And, of course, the entire transition to a single system had to be completely seamless.

The Strategy
For CGI, this was not unfamiliar territory, for the company had participated in the implementation of the provincial health department’s original budgetary monitoring system. This allowed CGI to quickly assemble a team of professionals with extensive experience in leading-edge technology. The group was able to immediately and easily integrate itself into the team already in place within the department. CGI’s experts got right to work coding the required programs, carrying out maintenance activities on the financial monitoring subsystem of the network’s health establishments and modifying the database (adding tables). They also developed the SBFR programs, conducted functional and unit testing and implemented production programs.

To make the system more user friendly, CGI converted the various modules to allow them to be accessed through Windows. A number of interfaces were also developed, most notably to allow Word and Outlook to be used to convert and automatically transmit via e-mail a variety of data, such as payment advices, while also allowing it to be accessed in PDF format (Acrobat Reader).

The Technology

• Sun Sparc Station 2 (RISC 6000 and AIX); Progress v6.2; Progress v8.0; Visual basic for Application (VBA) for Office 2000; Visual Basic 6.0; PC; UNIX DOS; OFFICE 2000; Netscape; NETTERM

The Results
The SBFR is in full operation and its stellar record constitutes one of CGI’s greatest successes. The technological challenge was great, the operational implementation elaborate and the complexity of the sector unquestionable. “The system is perfectly operational and providing the Department with numerous services,” stated Denis Patry, the Health Department’s project manager. “There is no question that the project’s success was due to the skill of CGI’s people and the ease with which its experts were able to integrate into our team.”

More importantly, CGI’s contribution to this major restructuring of Quebec’s health system speaks volumes about the company’s level of expertise and its ability to mobilize its resources to the benefit of governments in the initiatives they undertake to improve how they manage and serve their customers.