N.Y. counties turn to Salient to boost efficiency

The New York State Association of Counties (NYSAC) is partnering with Salient to help push the company’s Muni-Minder software as a solution to improve management of county governments’ programs and business processes.

The Salient software is an example of technology that counties can use to be more efficient at a time when governments are being pushed to do more with their programs and services while dealing with declining revenues, said Stephen Acquario, NYSAC’s executive director.

“It makes the investigative process thousands of time faster than before, enabling every manager to see the results of their decision as soon as they are recorded,” he said.

Chemung County, N.Y., has recently started to deploy Muni-Minder to some of its agencies after a year of development and pilot testing and has already seen some amazing results, said Linda Huffner, the county’s commissioner of human services.

“We’d been looking for a number of years for any solutions that would help us manage outcomes and workflows and to use information in ways that make sense,” she said. “We had been given access to the statewide Medicare database, for example, and we quickly saw there were tons of information of importance to us, but we had no easy ways of navigating it.”

Muni-Minder, which is client software, enables users to view the data in different ways with a simple point-and-click approach, Huffner said, and it provides the ability to drill into the data to see more detailed views of what is happening where and why.

It gives county case managers a way of gauging their performance relative to their agency and individual goals, and for assessing how well various approaches work. It provides a real-time view of how well certain things are working based on county, state and federal metrics.

“We did not have any ability before to look into individual performances,” Huffner said.

The Salient software not only identifies potential cost savings but also enables greater government accountability, which is something New York taxpayers are increasingly pushing for statewide, Acquario said.