The Summit County Health Department has been working to increase its internal efficiency, Health Director Phil Bondurant has told the County Council.
“We in the Health Department are funded a considerable amount by grants,” Bondurant said. “Federal grants, state grants, local grants, and each of our nine divisions are impacted in some way by the grant approval process, and we wanted to make sure that, with that being 40% to 50% of our funding, we wanted to see if we were efficiently approving those and getting as much of the funding into the community as we could.”
The Health Department typically manages 77 grants per year, totaling $4.2 million, and each grant requires a contract that is signed by multiple officials within both the state and local government. Bondurant described the signature gathering process as “cumbersome” and “resource intensive.”
From the time the Summit County Health Department receives a contract, it takes a little over a week for final approval and the release of funds, Bondurant said.
“You think about a week’s time frame and all of the people that are involved along that way, there’s a process there that probably deserves additional attention and evaluation,” he added.
Bondurant said that the Health Department participated in a legal analysis to see what steps, if any, they could eliminate from the process. However, state law requires many of the steps and does not make them easy to modify.
“We did eliminate some internal steps, but the process has not been evaluated yet given that most of our contracting occurs July 1 or somewhere in the early summer due to the fiscal year that the state operates on,” Bondurant explained.
The Health Department is working with the Public Health Accreditation Board to continue its internal review.
“While the Peak Performance Initiative has rendered great results across the county, for us, this will be an ongoing exercise for the next five years to make sure that we evaluate our internal processes against a national standard to make sure we’re operating in a space that we’re the most effective health department that we can be,” Bondurant said.