Agency – Imperial County Local Health Authority

Interviewee – Christina Olson, Health Program Administrator

Interview Date – 9/9/2016

Outcome – Win

Proposal Bid – $31,530

RSM - Reed and Redfern

Proposal - originally dated July 18, 2016

Background

• The Imperial County Local Health Authority Commission was set up in 2014 by the County Board of Supervisors and the State of California to oversee and deliver healthcare to Medi-cal beneficiaries. It is composed of medical professionals, hospital administrators and laymen. (more background at http://www.thedesertreview.com/county-board-nominates-members-for-local-health-authority-commission/)
• The Local Health Authority is separate entity from the County
• Their existing website is pretty minimal and basically lists commission and committee agendas for now and hangs off the county website (http://www.co.imperial.ca.us/BoardSuperv/index.asp)
• Christina is the staff person on the committee that was charged with building a new website; they checked with the County IT department and someone there had met Reed and suggested that they contact Vision
• Reed talked with Christina by phone and then went to El Centro for a meeting in April that lasted nearly 3 hours; Christina said Reed was incredibly responsive and it was great to see so many website examples
• Christina said that they wanted a professional, modern, user-friendly site and decided to go big with a firm experienced in local government - instead of with a smaller local web firm
• Their situation is unique in that this is a essentially a brand new project and they really don't have any content on their existing site which is a situation that we generally don't see in our projects
• Redfern took over the account and provided the final quote
• The project never went to RFP and Christina did some research on some other vendors, but liked that Vision was based in California and was somewhat nearby

Why did we win?

• The keys were:
  • Our flexibility
  • Being located in California
  • Willingness to come to El Centro for presentation 
  • Willingness to understand that their circumstance is different
  • Willingness to negotiate on price

What could we improve?

• Nothing

Other points

• There are 5 counties that have established local health authorities - and it is a visible project for the State of California too. We could leverage our experience with Imperial County to the other local health authorities (the other counties are Fresno-Kings-Madera and Los Angeles)
• Representatives from the County IT team attended the meeting with Reed, and they will be looking for a new website in the next year or two - doing well on this project will put us in prime position for the County's website. At a minimum, we need to keep in touch with our contacts at the county so we're ahead of the game when they're ready to upgrade their website
• Since their current site is so minimal, we are moving our UX process until the site is launched and they have some idea of how users will use the site
• They are still trying to figure out what they want to put on their site and what content they will need

Takeaways

• Longtime connections - Reed's connection with the County IT department led them to recommend Vision to the Local Health Authority team who was researching website developers
• Local - being based locally is important to some customers
• Flexibility - being flexible on pricing and process was important to Imperial County