Greensboro resident and Health and Human Resources Secretary Aldona Wos announced Monday that she has created the new position of chief information officer to help the department meet its July 1 goal of going live with a new computer network:
Joseph Cooper Jr., who’s worked for Bank of America, First Citizens Bank and most recently RBC Bank USA, will take the newly created post in a department already facing challenges within information technology for Medicaid.
The state Department of Health and Human Services has more than 17,000 employees and needed someone to bring efficiency to its vast computer networks and systems, Wos said in an interview.
“Our IT structure is very complicated with very many specific projects,” Wos said, adding: “It is a huge undertaking.”
Wos has also hired an outside agency to scrutinize the project, adding “she would be surprised if the consultant uncovers something that would scuttle the project altogether.” Let’s hope not.
For what it was worth, Gov. Pat McCrory gave DHHS employees a ‘pep talk’ —if you want to call it that, considering the fact that he said he’d “never seen such a broken information systems operation until I came here.”
