When FEI began operations in 1999, the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) was one of our very first customers. For nearly 20 years, we have continued to support SAMHSA projects and initiatives, especially in the administration and tracking of grant funding for substance use disorder prevention and mental health treatment services nationwide.

In 2010, we took over the federal agency’s Web Block Grant Application System (WebBGAS) – an online portal state mental health and substance use disorder agencies use to submit federal block grant applications and reports. SAMHSA distributes block grants to assist in the treatment of substance use and other mental health disorders, and the WebBGAS portal is used to help manage the administration and reporting for those grants. We planned, designed, implemented, tested, enhanced and continue to maintain WebBGAS today.

At project award, we had 30 days to take over full operations of the portal. And, thanks to our sophisticated approach to project transitions and ability to collaborate closely with incumbent vendors on new projects, we were successful in maintaining all system operations, maintenance functions and user support services during the transition period and beyond.

Within two months of contract award, SAMHSA completely revised the business process for states to apply and manage the grant process. This required a complete system re-architecture to address the need for modernizing the legacy system and implement SAMHSA’s desired changes to the block grant application and reporting requirements. In six months, we re-architected the system to align with new requirements and migrated all previous systems data into a single repository.

The WebBGAS project is just one of the many ways we continue to support SAMHSA and their work to mitigate the impact of substance use disorder and mental health challenges nationwide. Especially in the wake of the global pandemic when drug overdoses in the U.S. reached their highest levels ever recorded, we remain committed to serving the agency and supporting their work with our innovative technology solutions. Over the years, we’ve added additional grant programs including Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH) programs, State Targeted Response to the Opioid Crisis Grants (O-STR) programs, and Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness (PAIMI) programs. We have created better ways for states to report Synar data to the agency. (Synar data refers to laws enacted to prevent the sale of tobacco to those under the age of 18.) We also developed extensive data collection and reporting capabilities and converted historical data from more than 15 systems to a common Service Oriented Architecture-based environment.