The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) today announced it has cleared a pileup of maltreatment cases for elders, vulnerable adults and their families from 2017. MDH Assistant Commissioner Gil Acevedo says there was a backlog of “a little over 3000 cases and over a period of seven months with the help from the Department of Human Services, Office of Inspector General and the Office of Continuous Improvement, we worked through to clear that backlog, meaning that we went through looked at every single case and made a disposition within those cases.” Acevedo says eliminating paper-based processes and streamlining internal case reviews helped get the backlog cleared. Acevedo says looking ahead”the unfortunate thing is that we are still receiving approximately 400 reports a week, about 58 a day, of complaints of either elder abuse or maltreatment and so we need to get upstream and start looking at preventive strategies.”