Written by One of the most pressing challenges facing the Department for Children and Families (DCF) in Kansas was limited staffing resources to handle the increased demand for services. The DCF leadership group’s primary goals were to control and reduce fraud, achieve efficiency of service delivery, move towards virtual/online services, and focus on self-sufficiency of DCF clients.
The State of Kansas partnered with Change & Innovation Agency (C!A) to analyze DCFs’ most important eligibility practices to determine different strategies for processing the work. Every step and interaction was focused on evaluating the processes and systems in which staff do the eligibility work and developing/implementing a plan to bring improvements and increased efficiency.
Outcomes of the project included:
- Increased the speed of processing time by 40% to 60%, depending on program
- Improved SNAP payment accuracy from 94% to 99%
- Achieved timeliness of 95%, an increase from 85% before the project began
- Reduced the average time to process applications and issue benefits from 30 days to ten days
- Eliminated backlog of pending actions
- DCF was awarded the USDA High Performance Bonus for FY 2014 of $621,501 for most improved payment error rate
Read the entire article at https://changeagents.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/KS_Case_201808.pdf