Hawaii Department of Health Digital Services
Vital records, licensing, and one of the first three states reporting deaths to SSA in real time
What we built
A portfolio of digital services for the Hawaii Department of Health: birth and death certificate ordering, marriage permits, officiant licensing, cannabis dispensary licensing, and real-time death reporting to the Social Security Administration.
Why it mattered
Vital records touch people at the most important moments of their lives, and the paper processes were slow and error-prone. The real-time death reporting integration made Hawaii one of the first three states connected to SSA, cutting fraud and stopping benefit payments to the deceased far faster than the old batch processes.
Medical cannabis registry and dispensary licensing
When Hawaii's medical cannabis program moved from the Department of Public Safety to the Department of Health (Act 177, effective January 1, 2015), I designed the workings of the patient registry and handed the design and architecture to my team to build, working directly with DOH and with other states' programs and reporting results and challenges to DOH, the Access Hawaii Committee, and the legislature. Patients and caregivers could download and print their cards, with QR codes so enforcement could tell a valid card from a superseded one. Patient enrollment rose 63% on the new system and the medical provider registry grew about 78%. Support requests had a 3-business-day requirement; 80% were handled within one day and 95% within two. We also launched the online dispensary application and licensing system for the new dispensary program (Act 241, HRS 329D), which did not exist before, in January 2016.
Impact
These services became some of the most-used offerings on the eHawaii.gov portal and a model for DOH digital partnerships that NIC pointed to nationally.