Human Services

The Challenge

People depend on your human services organization for critical assistance as they face life’s most difficult challenges. State agencies are on the frontline for delivering services to vulnerable children, families in crisis, people with disabilities, dislocated workers and others in need. The economic downturn has caused even more families to require aid from multiple programs adding to the complexity of delivering and administering services. Caseloads have expanded to an untenable level. And there is increased urgency to deploy services quickly and efficiently, even as budgets require you to do more with less. In addition to budgetary challenges, the workforce is changing. In recent years, states have been experiencing increased turnover as tenured, highly trained public servants retire. As replacements are hired, they do not have the deep understanding of the programs or the systems supporting them.

From a technology perspective, many of the automated systems in use today are aging. For example, the systems used to determine eligibility for TANF, SNAP and Medicaid are often more than 20 years old and built using older, inflexible programming languages. States relying on these systems face multiple issues including difficulty in making changes or supporting new requirements, increased cost for maintaining aging hardware and inability to support new channels of service delivery such as internet self-service. In addition, these legacy systems often operate as silos, with no ability to share common data among different programs. Collaboration and coordination of care among programs is not realized and duplicative data gathering minimizes productivity.

The availability of federal stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has created both opportunity and challenges for States. While States welcome the influx of one-time funds for improving technology and enhancing services, these funds require comprehensive reporting not easily accomplished with existing systems. And at the State level, legislatures and assemblies are also focusing on human services programs, mandating compliance with a wide array or requirements that define specific steps and processes for programs such as timeframes for eligibility determination and other quality assurance measures.

How can you best leverage technology and business processes to maintain the quality of critical programs, handle increased workload and enhance the effectiveness of scarce human resources? States need tools to help today’s operational objectives and support the evolving future requirements for human services delivery and system modernization, as well.

The Solution

CSG can help. Since 1997, CSG has been delivering solutions to government organizations with broad experience in Human Services best practices and information technology. As an experienced partner and trusted advisor to state agencies, CSG is totally dedicated to the success of your organization. With our expertise in Enterprise Case Management (ECM), we will help you unlock the departmental silos in order to share a common tool set and knowledge base for collaboration, wherever appropriate.

CSG’s professionals have extensive experience administering human services programs as well as integrating information technology into the program delivery process. We collaborate with your organization to maximize efficiency across delivery functions including intake, assessment, eligibility determination, referrals and service management. In addition, we help you implement best practices in key supporting functions such as resource directories, claims and billing processes, service monitoring, reporting and information management.

Our approach is based on a phased and incremental approach to achieve your enterprise vision. Early planning and assessment are critical success factors. A thorough examination of the policies and procedures for each program is the first step. We will assist you in aligning your business and technology goals including developing the Planning and Implementation Advance Planning Documents ( APD). Once core requirements are established, a prioritized roadmap for incremental change can be created. Our comprehensive cost/ benefit analysis will identify how an incremental modernization approach can immediately add value for both the agency and its customers.