“Nearly 35 years later, MAXIS continues to chug along as the primary system counties use to determine eligibility and issue benefits for public assistance and health care.” (Dreamstime | TNS/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

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If you could travel back in time to 1989 and stop into a county office, you would find staff using MAXIS, a new, whiz-bang computer system to determine eligibility for assistance programs. No time travel is necessary, however, because that same system the state launched in 1989 is still what our counties must use today.

Before we first searched with Google, before Facebook existed, before smartphones became how many of us conduct personal transactions, there was MAXIS. Nearly 35 years later, MAXIS continues to chug along as the primary system counties use to determine eligibility and issue benefits for public assistance and health care.

Used by some 2,000 financial workers across the state, MAXIS is a venerable and antiquated system. All credit is due to its designers and those who have kept it alive over the decades! But MAXIS requires time-intensive training to learn specialized keystrokes to manually enter data and lacks basic timesaving functionality added long ago to most computer systems.

MAXIS is one of several state-run systems county workers use every day to deliver services to hundreds of thousands of the state's most vulnerable residents. Most of these state systems are more that 20-plus years old, are aging, and have not been fully modernized. These systems are our human services infrastructure and need updates and maintenance just like our roads and bridges.

Out-of-date systems and lack of connection between state and county systems create significant problems for Minnesota residents. This can result in delayed benefits needed to buy food or pay rent, problems getting medicine at a pharmacy, and mixed-up or uncoordinated services. This also wreaks havoc for counties who deliver these benefits causing inefficiencies for workers, delays in processing cases and less ability to recover costs.

State systems, due to lack of investments, have fallen decades behind the changing technology and service environment. That's why the Association of Minnesota Counties strongly supports system technology funding and applauds efforts by legislators to invest surplus dollars to modernize human service delivery systems. Current budget bills contain much-needed funding for technology upgrades to systems that form the backbone to child support, financial eligibility, health care and social service programs from child protection to adult mental health case management. Counties also appreciate the state embracing an agile mind-set that allows incremental investments and improvements to bring value immediately, instead of multiyear full replacements that have been problematic in the past.

These investments would enable counties to more efficiently and effectively manage human services programs, that would lead to more responsive services to hundreds of thousands of residents in every county in the state.

We are heartened to see the state recognizing the issue with these legacy systems and urge legislators to talk with their counties to understand the barriers and inefficiencies these systems create locally. Although state agencies provide and maintain these systems, counties also invest heavily in technologies that support, extend and fill gaps in these systems.

Minnesota operates under state-supervised, county-administered governance for human services. With this structure, it's essential that the state partners with the counties to co-create solutions that work for the county workers and the people served. As primary users and with firsthand knowledge of their impact on our residents, counties' perspective is needed to work collaboratively with the state to modernize and build the future human services ecosystem.

Creating a modern, responsive system requires replacement or upgrades of existing state human services systems along with modifications to county-provided technology that complement and depend on these systems. This modernization should focus on residents, community providers and front-line workers, building integrated access and communication channels that include mobile web portals, chat, texting and phones, as well as paper and in-person interactions for those who prefer these options.

We often hear a call for government to be more like businesses. When it comes to investments in technology and customer-focused services, these are business practices we can all agree government should emulate.

We doubt there are few, if any, businesses today still using 30-year-old technology systems as a mainstay of their operations. Our hope is that 2023 will finally be the year Minnesota makes the investments to retire or upgrade antiquated computer systems and gets back to the future.

Julie Ring is executive director of the Association of Minnesota Counties. On Twitter: @mncounties.