FY2025-Annual-Report

NJAMHAA Annual Report FY 2025 37 NJAMHAA’s IT Project remains a vital resource to providers and those they serve. All of its services are essential to help providers build and increase cybersecurity; ensure compliance with state and federal regulations; and eliminate obstacles, for example, for individuals to receive high-quality, integrated, coordinated care from all types of healthcare professionals. These areas are frequently topics at the IT Project’s annual conferences, as well as webinars throughout the year and in its biannual Bits & Bytes publication. The Information Technology (IT) world is changing at an extremely high speed and it seems to be accelerating. The IT Project staff works hard to both keep pace and get ahead of the curve, as well as help agencies stay informed by working with them, providing training and educational webinars, and connecting them to resources that can help them use IT tools to provide better services for those they serve. While these changes are never- ending, the IT Project staff remains consistent. Many of the key staff have been in their roles for many years. This has enabled them to work with agencies for a long time and develop strong working and personal relationships. IT Project Helps Providers Strengthen their Cybersecurity, Compliance and Quality of Services Additional benefits of working with the IT Project is its long history of being part of a trade association for behavioral health care and close collaboration with the Division of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS). In fact, it is the first – and possibly still the only – partnership between a state government entity and a trade association with the goal of supporting provider organizations with technology. By facilitating several practice groups, the IT Project team hears firsthand from agencies’ staff about issues and what is happening at their organizations. This fosters brainstorming for developing solutions, whether it is through training, partnerships with technology vendors, advocacy or any other strategy. Furthermore, the IT Project is able to offer services at significantly lower prices, compared to those in the regular market. The IT Project is continuously available to support internal and external members’ staff with technical support issues, project planning, new building moves and transitioning agencies to Microsoft 365 cloud services. “The IT Project was an early adopter of Microsoft’s 365 cloud services for nonprofits. Initially, it was solely for email services, and the team was able to move email systems from agencies’ on-premise servers to the cloud,” explained Ron Gordon, Director of the IT Project. “This was and still is a big advantage because it leverages Microsoft as a company that has enormous resources for access, security and disaster recovery. Over the years, Microsoft has greatly expanded cloud services and the IT Project has been helping agencies move more and more of their IT services within that system.” In addition, the IT Project continues to use remote tools to efficiently provide support to members, including weekly server and network maintenance for contracted agencies, and helping with issues and installing software when needed. In FY2025, remote operations included implementing Windows server updates; reviewing server logs, quarantine and third-party spam filter logs and correcting issues that were identified; providing