A state agency was facing a major backlog of work. Offices responsible for processing applications for cash, medical and food assistance had thousands of applications waiting to be processed. In some offices, it was taking up to six months to process the applications. Federal guidelines give states 30 days to process food assistance applications and seven days for expedited food assistance applications. The client needed to find a better way and improve their responsiveness.

The Greentree Group Solution

Greentree developed an organizational improvement strategy and I.T. strategic plan for the management and oversight of the development of the agency’s redesigned eligibility system. Our team helped the state agency reinvent the entire I.T. organization, which serves the agency.

A significant part of our responsibilities included analyzing risks and issues, verifying system design, and validating functional requirements in designing and rolling out their redesigned eligibility system. Working with both the business users and I.T. teams, Greentree helped ensure that requirements were complete, clear, concise, and accurate.

Results

Greentree’s efforts have helped this state agency improve their system performance and reliability.

The agency was able to recover and dig itself out of the large backlog. With a renewed sense of focus, the redesigned eligibility system rolled out and drove the agency back on track. The rollout of the modern web-based eligibility solution to more than 300 eligibility offices and five million clients provided a standardized statewide solution that allows for enriched functionality such as automated eligibility determination and electronic integration with their client-facing self-service application.

Currently, over 9,000 caseworkers use the redesigned eligibility system daily to process and maintain client information. One of the most significant measures of the system’s effectiveness is the state timeliness data for case dispositions. Before the statewide rollout of the redesigned eligibility system, timeliness for a disposition of benefits was at 57.5%, a rate that meant the state agency was facing sanctions from the federal government. Their regions are currently maintaining timeliness at 97%. The state agency has since received a $6.2 Million performance bonus from the federal government for dramatically improving its error rate.