About
Starting Semester: Fall 2023Assigned: No
Location: Atlanta
Department of Human Services
Client Profile
The Georgia Department of Human Services (DHS) delivers a wide range of human services designed to promote self-sufficiency, safety and well-being for all Georgians. The Office of Family Independence is part of the Division of Family and Children Services, and OFI Eligibility Support Specialists determine eligibility for the federal benefit programs of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Medical Assistance (Medicaid, PeachCare for Kids (R)) in the state's integrated eligibility system, operated by DHS. All OFI works to support and strengthen Georgia families.Project Description
The Gateway System is Georgia’s Eligibility system for Medicaid (MAO), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Childcare (CAPS), and WIC.For this Need within the Office of Independence we are focused on work with MAO, SNAP, and TANF. Work is distributed by Task (Intake, Renewal, Change) then assigned out by availability based off of customer’s County, District, then who else is available based on the workers "role" in the system to work the case, statewide. After a case is assigned for applicable cases our robotic processing automation (RPA) technology runs to optimize and complete manual pre-work and then reassigns back to the worker. For other cases, all our data matches are run once work is initiated by a worker for data collection.
Current drawback to our task routing system:
All work that comes in is distributed to all eligible case workers depending on their "role" to administer certain case types. This causes eligibility staff to have many tasks that take up space on their dashboards (more than 500). Supervisors are having to manually provide daily focus reports to eligibility staff to help workers prioritize their work and manage timeliness. Timeliness is a metric of success in federal benefit administration. There is no logic on complexity and/or completeness of a case before the Gateway system assigns a task to a worker. Gateway struggles to keep work balanced among eligibility staff due to tasks that are assigned with multiple programs (single application for customers, may have multiplied eligibility workers depending on "role" of SNAP vs TANF worker - to eligibility staff with singular roles.
Through process improvement, intelligent routing, and innovative technology I would like to create a task routing system that is intuitive in how work is assigned one task at a time using RPA technology and checking interfaces to assignment completeness. With the assignment of task one at a time the agency can focus on cases that drive timeliness on a higher level than supervisors monitoring it on the local or worker level. Production and time management could be monitored without an outside tracking tool or laborious manual reporting. With using a system to assign complexity and completeness, the system can assign out tasks on a focused level to meet timeliness standards and refocus supervisor work on supporting eligibility staff with quality support of complex cases.