Executive Summary
The opioid overdose crisis has resulted in significant settlement funding for states, including Connecticut. These funds create an important opportunity to support treatment, recovery, prevention, and harm eduction. As part of the settlement agreement, Connecticut must track and report how these dollars are distributed in a transparent and accountable way. Before this project, that work was handled manually through spreadsheets, emails, and shared folders, which made it difficult to organize information and limited public visibility. To address these issues, the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) and the Opioid Settlement Advisory Committee (OSAC) developed a single system to manage projects, track funding, support public meetings, and display real-time results for staff, leadership, partners, and residents.
The system was delivered through short, focused sprints, with work planned in Azure DevOps and built using
.NET, Angular, and Power BI. It includes secure features such as Azure AD token-based authentication, rolebased access, reCAPTCHA, and application-level auditing, while also following WCAG 2.2 accessibility
guidelines. Close coordination between the business and IT teams helped the project move quickly and replace manual processes. Today, the system manages 21 active projects totaling more than $185 million, records public meetings, and shares financial, project, and outcome information through a real-time public dashboard. Overall, the project created a more organized, reliable, and transparent way to oversee opioid settlement funding.
