A significant part of the discussion at this year’s APHSA’s (American Public Human Services Association) 54th ISM (IT Solutions Management) annual conference & expo was about modernization and the need for innovation in the public sector.
Government organizations are followers when it comes to implementing new technology—they are rarely the leading-edge users and tend to stick to what they know. The reason being: They need to be cautious to ensure any tech advancements support compliance rules and regulations they must follow—and getting budget authorization is never easy. The net result: Independent legacy systems remain and can be organizationally difficult to replace by modern technology solutions, even though such solutions are available and are well-proven in the commercial world.
Innovation improves customer service and recruitment
Apart from budget, difficulties arise because of embedded processes that developed in times past. For example, the need to have field workers or others vet benefit applications before any information is entered. Plus, older systems with limited capacity often have difficulty dealing with surges in demand. Government employees can filter out many who are not entitled and reduce strain on the system. But modern cloud-based solutions can quickly scale, eliminating bottlenecks and reducing unnecessary human effort. So, the need is not simply to replace aging systems that are becoming ever more expensive to support but to innovate processes to eliminate redundant interventions while providing better customer service.
In many circumstances, better service means self-service. Allowing citizens to enter their information into an application, for example, not only speeds the application process but frees up scarce human resources to focus on service delivery, improving the citizen experience further. In addition, such applications can be made online and avoid the need for appointments and face-to-face meetings. And with today’s online identity resolution and data quality techniques, the information entered is also much more likely to be accurate, again freeing up the precious time of field workers.
For example, Experian’s real-time address, phone, and email verification solutions can validate mailing addresses to ensure accuracy and that mail is deliverable. This avoids the necessity to track undelivered mail and notifications that did not reach intended recipients. In addition, our phone number verification software checks whether the number is legitimate, whether it belongs to a temporary (or burner) phone, and whether it is currently live. Similarly, our email verification checks to see if the inbox is active and whether it is a residential or business domain, which is often required for collections or to avoid fraud.
Another key benefit of using up-to-date technology is that it makes recruiting and retaining the right skills easier. With baby boomers expected to retire in droves over the next few years, finding, for example, Algol programmers to maintain aging mainframe computers has become almost impossible. Plus, younger recruits want to work with modern systems and quickly get frustrated when much of their work is generated by older technology and outdated processes.
Pandemic boosts innovation
An unforeseen benefit of the pandemic was that it sped decision-making in many government organizations as agencies struggled to meet the needs of affected citizens. With mandatory lockdowns in place, only phone and electronic communications were feasible. In-person communication became almost impossible. Because of the pandemic, numerous system improvements were pushed through budgeting and development cycles in record time. In Clark County, NV, for example, the Human Services department was able to quickly get agreement to build and deploy a new online portal, achieved in record time, just 90 days.
Before the pandemic, getting an agreement and budget may have taken years. The online portal supports self-service and provides a wealth of information to help citizens determine their benefit eligibility. There was concern that vulnerable populations such as the homeless and the unemployed would not have access to online capabilities. However, with over 97% of the US population owning a cell phone and most working-age citizens having smartphones, the portal could support at least 80% of constituents 80% of the time. Reaching the remainder, such as the long-term homeless or unemployed, was achieved with the help of community-based organizations and far fewer county field employees.
Migration is still a challenge
Despite the ability of some agencies to move quickly, others remain mired in their legacy environments. Part of the challenge is data migration. Agencies need to maintain public records for long periods, and the data in their systems can easily be outdated. Plus, over long periods, the personnel who maintain the systems change, the rules and regulations change, and the types of information collected can also change. Faced with all that change and older systems holding vast amounts of data that can be hard to access, even planning for replacement systems becomes problematic. Because of this, some migration projects take years. It’s hard to find and fix data issues when you can only guess what they are.
Understanding the data, bringing disparate or duplicated records together, cleansing and validating contact data, combining fields from different systems with different schema, and so on, requires significant resources and time without modern data management solutions to help. Yet the benefits are clear. Clean, comprehensive, and correct data allows agencies to develop mature analytic processes. This enables them to move quickly beyond simply descriptive (recording what’s happened) and diagnostic (analyzing what’s happened) capabilities to predictive (e.g., what will be the result of % unemployment) and prescriptive (the best interventions and courses of action needed to address social determinants of health) capabilities. These later capabilities can help speed the delivery of support and benefits to those in most need while reducing agency spending.
Experian can help take the spade work out of data migration, turning projects that might otherwise take years into ones that are accomplished within as little as a few months and greasing the wheels of modernization to move projects along much more quickly.
Experian can help improve and maintain data quality
Experian’s data quality platform, Aperture Data Studio, is designed to address data quality issues and automate their resolution as much as possible. No data management system can fix core data errors such as incorrectly entered birth data or social security numbers. What they can do is quickly highlight what errors may exist and help data analysts prioritize where to put their efforts.
Aperture can ingest and profile entire datasets and promptly produce an analysis that shows format errors and data elements incorrectly placed in the wrong field, missing data, and data that is out of range, such as birthdays well over a hundred years old. It can quickly identify potential anomalies between fields, for example, gender = male, parental status = mother. It can track changes over time so that once the data is corrected, accuracy can be maintained. More importantly, it can monitor the data quality across the enterprise, eliminate duplication, and harmonize records between disparate datasets, feeding accurate data into agency systems.
This is a valuable capability during modernization projects when data needs to be transformed, cleansed, and transferred from legacy systems to new ones. By automating mundane data quality tasks, Aperture Data Studio also helps improve job satisfaction levels, enabling organizations to attract better and retain the skills they need to be agile and resilient.
Interest in redetermination still emerging
As soon as the public health emergency is declared over, looming on the horizon is redetermination (Redet). Given the widespread need for modernization, Redet has yet to become a significant priority. However, soon, health departments will need to be able to reprocess millions of Medicaid applicants to ensure they are still entitled to receive benefits. Per CMS guidelines, Redet will require prioritization based on several factors, including using other benefits such as SNAP and income level. The guidelines also recommend “improving communications and outreach to beneficiaries, such as by:
- updating contact information
- partnering with health plans
- establishing processes to address returned beneficiary mail or using multiple modalities to reach individuals (e.g., mail, email, text)”
Experian can help. We offer contact data validation and updating capabilities, income verification, database analysis and deduplication, cross-referencing, and overall data quality solutions. Our products are easy to use, without needing programming skills, and can typically be installed and activated quickly.
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