A recent empirical study analyzing data from 156 countries revealed that increasing government efficiency can “significantly improve health outcomes,” with the most dramatic benefits felt by those aged 0–4 and over 50. Today, a majority of the U.S. seems to agree that government systems are not as efficient as they could be. The number of Gallup poll respondents who report believing that government agencies are “wasteful and inefficient” has ranged from 53%–62% over the past eight years and currently sits at 56%, indicating some room for improvement.
At Change & Innovation Agency® (C!A), one of our primary goals is helping agencies build capacity and increase the amount of work they can accomplish with the resources they have available, and improving efficiency is one of our key strategies for capacity building. Our 20+ years of experience optimizing health and human services (HHS) programs has taught us a lot about the hurdles agencies face in terms of efficiency, but it has also taught us that innovation is crucial to meaningful efficiency gains. Below are three approaches we use to help agencies build efficiency through innovation – and consistently serve 40–130% more customers, 70% faster.
Efficiency and Innovation…
Inspired by People
People are at the heart of all HHS agency outcomes, and we believe business process optimization requires understanding and supporting all user groups, so that’s the first place our change agents turn for opportunities related to innovation and efficiency. We communicate with staff and administration at all levels and identify and engage as many key interest holders as possible to gather insight into how different users navigate processes and technology, but also to locate various bottlenecks, pain points, and inefficiencies. For example, we know that in many places, child care providers hesitate to participate in subsidy programs because the hurdles of the process can seem to outweigh the benefits. Building our understanding of this pain point helped us to develop a comprehensive user portal for child care providers that makes participation in subsidy programs easier and more efficient, thereby increasing the number of child care providers working with subsidy programs and enhancing program efficacy overall. More recently, we engaged with community-based organizations (CBOs) to develop a user portal specific to their workflows and needs in our Medicaid Express solution – no other Medicaid eligibility system in the US currently provides this capability for this user group.
Inspired by Policy
It may be tempting to think of policies as hurdles, but they can just as easily be opportunities. Our change agents are experienced with both federal and state-level policies, and we use that experience to help agencies identify ways that policy can be used to enhance efficiency and innovation. We look for any processes that don’t align with policy – whether that means not meeting policy or going beyond policy – and our teams stay current on policy changes and explore the possibilities they present. For example, we’ve worked with agencies who were using more stringent and extensive documentation and verification requirements in their application process than were currently required by policy. Identifying and removing these unnecessary requirements helped simplify the application process and eliminated bottlenecks for these agencies, leading to more efficient results, freeing up staff for complex cases, and connecting individuals and families to services faster.
Inspired by Performance Visibility
Workflow, process, and system visibility are all key to understanding where and how agency programs can be made more efficient, but not all data is equally useful for such analysis. Our teams are familiar with the metrics and reports required for successfully unlocking capacity and enhancing efficiency in health and human services, and we use this data to guide our consulting. We’ve used these metrics, for example, to identify common basic tasks that require considerable staff time and could be partially or completely automated to improve efficiency, such as account lookups and password resets, data extraction for common types of documents, and outreach to customers for missing documentation or information. But we also go a step further by ensuring our clients have consistent, curated access to critical data insights as well as support for future data needs, empowering them to pursue data-driven efficiency and innovation both with our assistance and on their own terms. This has helped agencies increase the efficiency of their outreach and marketing efforts, among other capacity-building initiatives.
Inspired by Process Integration
The U.S. Government Accountability Office’s Efficiency and Effectiveness Report makes annual recommendations about reducing not only process overlap and duplication but also process fragmentation, and our experience helping agencies improve efficiency has shown us how critical this step can be. That’s why our change agents are always looking for opportunities to enhance communication and connections across processes, systems, and agencies and why our technology solutions are all built to facilitate easy intersystem and interagency integrations. Current™, our workflow and workload management solution, for example, has been used to connect work across both diverse counties and diverse health and human services agencies, reducing fragmentation across services and in turn, leading to more efficient work routing, improving timeliness and service quality, and providing reporting insights that enable easy cross-agency and cross-county comparisons.
The Importance of Innovation to Efficiency
Efficiency may sometimes look like reducing staff, budgets, or resources, but for us, it more often means looking for opportunities to innovate, and we identify many of those opportunities by engaging with people, policy, performance visibility, and process integration – and (spoilers ahead) we’ve seen consistently positive results. For example, with our partnership, the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services has been able to process applications 65% faster, answer customer calls 35% faster, and has achieved administrative efficiencies worth more than $32 million. And the Texas Health and Human Services Commission has seen timeliness improvements of 23–56% across various programs, in addition to reducing overtime expenditures by more than 50%.
“It all comes down to timeliness – how quickly you can deliver services to those who need them. That’s what our families care about, that’s what our legislators care about. With the transition to process management, we’ve turned our cycle time around. Applications that used to take 22 or 23 days to process, now take an average of 5.” – Ronald Kreher, Director Department of Health and Social Services, State of Alaska Division of Public Assistance
Innovating to help agencies enhance efficiency is one of our core practices – and one of the key ways we help agencies do more good, together.
To Learn More
- Access our interactive impact map to read more about our success stories related to efficiency, innovation, and capacity.
- We offer a Medicaid/SNAP capacity calculator to help agencies assess their current operational capacity, which can provide important insights for agencies looking to enhance efficiency. Calculators for additional programs will be available soon.
- Reach out to discuss and explore how we can help your agency improve efficiency through innovation.
