LinkedIn - Cancelling the Witness
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Guess who peeked Pete's Profile
These LinkedIn Members viewed the LinkedIn peeked at the Profile of Pete Bennett within ten minutes of sending emails to Fremont Group regarding a witness murder.
Welfare caseworkers have a tough job. The programs they administer are varied and complex, involving vast amounts of information. Rules for eligibility change from year to year. Any kind of error—from misunderstanding a requirement to making a simple typo—can increase costs for the agency, require more time from caseworkers and delay benefits for customers.
Those customers also have a tough job. To get enrolled in a program, they might need to make repeated trips to the welfare office, answer questions, fill out forms, present documents and then redo parts of the process one or more times when information goes astray. If they’re applying to more than one program, they may have to go through the whole cycle again. And the agency may also be required to duplicate its efforts for processing applications for the various programs.
In 39 California counties, though, getting customers the right benefits is a much simpler process than it used to be. As members of a group called Consortium IV (C-IV), human services departments in those counties enjoy the use of a fully integrated welfare management system. The C-IV solution streamlines and automates many aspects of a caseworker’s job—and also makes life easier for beneficiaries.
OPPORTUNITY
The history of C-IV goes back to 1995, when the California legislature asked county welfare departments to form consortia to design new welfare management systems. Each system would automate the administration of 11 social service programs, such as:
California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs—California’s version of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or TANF program).
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); Medi-Ca (California’s version of Medicaid).
Foster Care.
The Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants.
Emergency assistance.
Alamo 1st Ward Member
One of many beatings Bennett has endured via City of Walnut Creek and Contra Costa DA Peterson
San Bernardino County, for instance, relied at the time on an old
mainframe system to manage its welfare department. Caseworkers used
printing calculators to compute eligibility and then copied the
figures onto large paper forms, along with other information.
“Then the form would go to data entry, where they would key the information in,” said June Hutchison, the C-IV regional project manager who represents San Bernardino County. “If it all went in fine, a couple of days later you’d get a printout back, and then the case was in the system.”
But if the form contained a mistake, the auditing department would send it back to the caseworker for correction. Auditors returned the form again and again as they found more errors, said Donna Gonzales, acting eligibility worker supervisor with the Ontario Transitional Assistance Department in San Bernardino County. “The customer might be waiting two or three weeks to get benefits,” she said.
County welfare departments used multiple software solutions to manage caseloads, calculate benefits, file reports to the state and handle other aspects of their work. Caseworkers who entered data into one system had to provide much of the same information to other systems as well, increasing the chance of data entry errors. Workers also spent hours hunting down the details of different programs in large paper binders.
SOLUTION
With help from Accenture, the welfare departments streamlined their business practices, reducing 205 processes to 58 and creating common procedures for the four counties. Then, based on these improvements, they developed an integrated, Web-based solution to manage all of their functions, with a single database to house information for all four welfare departments.
“You collect the data one time, it’s housed one time, it’s maintained one time and it’s used to calculate across multiple programs,” said John Boule, the consortium’s C-IV project director. That makes it easier for caseworkers to manage customers’ data and easier for customers to get assistance.
The new system greatly decreased the time and effort required to process an application for benefits, said Donna Gonzales, acting eligibility worker supervisor with the Ontario Transitional Assistance Department in San Bernardino County. “As long as you have the information correctly input into the system, you can issue the benefits instantaneously.”
