HHSC staff were retyping mainframe records into Excel for reviews, audits and reports. Copy as table removed most of that manual work, while centrally managed masking kept Social Security numbers out of copied data.
Before and after
| Before | After WND Terminal | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting a screen list into Excel | Retype it, or paste one long text column and split it by hand | Ctrl+Shift+C, paste, done |
Case and county codes like 0042 | Excel turned them into 42 | Kept as 0042 |
| SSNs in copied data | Copied in full; staff told to delete them by hand | Masked by policy in every copy and print |
| Time to build a 40-row QA review sheet | About 25 minutes | About 3 minutes |
| Keying errors found by QA | 4.1% of hand-built sheets | 0.3% |
| Emulator cost per seat | $205, after two increases in three years | $64, fixed for the contract term |
Staff had to rebuild mainframe lists in Excel.
HHSC's caseworkers and analysts work between two worlds. The records live on the mainframe. The reviews, audits, reconciliations and federal reports live in Excel. Getting from one to the other was the most tedious part of the day.
"We call it the swivel chair," Ruiz says. "Look at the mainframe, turn, type into Excel, turn back. A QA analyst reviewing 40 cases might retype 600 values. And every time someone retypes, someone makes a mistake."
Copying didn't help much. The old emulator pasted a whole screen as one column of text. Staff then had to split it into columns themselves, and Excel stripped the leading zeros off case numbers, county codes and provider IDs, which broke every lookup. QA's own audits found keying errors in about 4% of hand-built spreadsheets. In a federal Medicaid review, that's a finding.
There was a privacy problem too. Copying a screen copied Social Security numbers with it, and the only control was a training slide asking people to delete them.
And the cost kept going up. "The vendor raised prices twice in three years, and both times we got a letter, not a conversation," Ortega says. "Meanwhile the product couldn't do something as basic as paste a table into Excel. We were paying 2026 prices for 1998 software."
Why WND Terminal
HHSC ran a four-week trial with 40 people from QA and provider enrollment. Ruiz says the decision was made in the first week.
- Copy as table. Ctrl+Shift+C finds the columns from the screen's layout and puts a real table on the clipboard. Excel, Word and Outlook paste it as proper cells. With nothing selected, WND Terminal finds the list on the screen by itself and skips the headings and the "end of list" banner.
- Leading zeros stay. Values like
0042paste as text, so case numbers and county codes match the first time. - Paste goes into the right fields. Pasting from Excel into a mainframe screen moves to the next input field at each tab, and never types over a protected label. That makes bulk data entry from a spreadsheet safe.
- Privacy by policy. IT turned on masking for Social Security numbers and added patterns for Medicaid IDs. Masked values stay masked in every copy, print and AI request, and the mainframe's data isn't changed. IT can also turn off copy, paste or print entirely for specific groups.
"The trial group started forwarding each other screenshots of Excel," Ruiz says. "I've never seen people get excited about a terminal emulator. They were excited."
The rollout
HHSC rolled out over 14 weeks, region by region. IT imported its existing session profiles and keyboard maps, pushed one MSI through the state's software center, and set the agency's connections, masking rules and copy settings in a single policy.
The license model also fit how government budgets actually work. WND's license file is checked offline, and a paid license never locks anyone out. When the state's budget approval ran six weeks late, IT admins saw a renewal reminder, and nothing changed for the people doing the work.
"Every other vendor's license is a hostage note," Ortega says. "WND's is a polite email to my admins."
The results
About 60,000 hours of retyping eliminated a year. About 2,400 staff use copy-as-table regularly, about 48,000 times a month in total. At a conservative 6 minutes saved per copy, that's about 4,800 hours a month, or 57,600 a year.
Keying errors down from 4.1% to 0.3%. Spreadsheets built from copied tables don't have typos. QA's remaining errors come from manual edits after the paste.
SSNs masked in every copy. Privacy moved from a training slide to a setting that can't be skipped, and the agency's privacy office closed a long-open audit item.
Under a third of the price. At $64 a seat against a $205 renewal quote, HHSC saves about $874,000 a year on emulator licensing across 6,200 seats.
"It's the rare project where the people on the front line and the people in finance are equally happy," Ruiz says.
What's next
HHSC is sharing its WND policy template with two other Texas agencies on the same statewide contract. It's also piloting Explain for its eligibility help desk.
