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Title: Computer Problems Produced Frustration

April 12, 2000

VIRGINIA RYBIN and CHARLES LASZEWSKI STAFF WRITERS

It was a frustrating fall and winter for Ramsey County day-care providers -- and a stress-filled time for the office staff of Resources for Child Caring.

The agency's workers were putting in 14-hour days and six-day weeks trying to catch up with a massive backlog of payment records.

Frustrated day-care providers seeking answers to lengthy processing delays filled the voice mail system of the agency's office in St. Paul's Midway area, and many of those calls were not returned while staffers focused on entering data and getting out processing forms.

``It was a very hard time for us and a very hard time for providers and parents,'' said Sandra Borrmann, manager of child care assistance at Resources. ``It was hard on the case managers to know it was affecting Christmas for people.''

The chaos started to build in November, with the conversion to new computer software to track children from low-income families and pay the people providing their day care.

The agency's seven case workers began entering the data manually, a task that would not be completed until late December, nearly two months past the deadline. They were slowed down because the direct link between the Ramsey County and Resources computers moved slowly, sometimes taking minutes for one work screen to leave and another to take its place.

In addition, the software was producing all kinds of glitches, Borrmann said.

Although FreeLantz Solutions, the computer consultant, had a person at the site full time to handle problems, the corrections took hours and even days.

There were major problems with the software provided by FreeLantz Solutions. For example, workers would look for the parents' current co-payment for child care, and instead a lengthy list of co-payments would come up. Often, authorization forms would not print.

Changes to the software often led to changes in the way the case workers did their job, and this slowed everything even more. By mid-November, the Resources workers knew they had a colossal problem.

While the FreeLantz system had been used in a couple of small Minnesota counties, it had never been tested in a large urban county, Borrmann said.

Resources officials said it would have done no good to hire temporary workers because the data entry requires familiarity with the complex reimbursement system.

``The hardest part was knowing we created a problem for providers and parents,'' said Carol Rohde, executive director of Resources for Child Caring.

``And the time of year,'' added Borrmann. ``The closer it got to Christmas, the worse it got. There was nothing we could do except keep working.''

) 2000 PioneerPlanet / St. Paul (Minnesota) Pioneer Press - All Rights Reserved

http://www.pioneerplanet.com/news/mtc_docs/027199.htm

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-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), April 12, 2000