Children's Alliance of New
Hampshire: Doing More with Less
Concord, New Hampshire
If ever there was a time to marshal the resources available to help the disadvantaged, it is now. With Federal law limiting how long individuals can collect welfare, and with voters expressing concern about bureaucratic waste, social service agencies have come under tremendous pressure to serve their clients more effectively and, at the same time, trim their costs.
With the help of TIIAP, the Children's Alliance of New Hampshire, a nonprofit organization, has found a way to achieve both of those goals. Since 1995, it has been testing a computerized system that enables diverse agencies to help screen applicants for each other's services. Using the system, a caseworker at any one agency can collect information that will determine whether a particular individual or family is eligible for benefits offered by any of the participating service providers. By sharing this information over a secure computer network (provided the applicants approve), agencies can eliminate duplicative information-collection and application procedures.
Addressing Changes in Welfare
More is at stake than administrative efficiency. The system increases the chances that disadvantaged families will receive all the benefits for which they are eligible something that often does not happen in the current patchwork system of social service programs. Social service agencies hope that if clients are able to collect a more comprehensive array of benefits, they will stand a better chance of making lasting progress toward self-sufficiency.
"If we can provide services in a comprehensive, coordinated way, we have a much better chance of helping people become self-sufficient for the long term," says Steve Geller, Executive Director of Rockingham Community Action in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
SafetyNet-New Hampshire, as the Children's Alliance program is known, is one of a series of efforts by public and private agencies around the nation to use telecommunications to improve both the quality and cost-effectiveness of social programs. "The idea is to serve people more efficiently, create a seamless web of services, and improve our ability to track outcomes, both for individual clients and in the aggregate," says Geller.
The centerpiece of the SafetyNet-New Hampshire project is Benefit Outreach Screening Software, or BOSS. Developed by the United Seniors Health Cooperative and customized for New Hampshire through the Children's Alliance, BOSS poses a detailed set of questions and then assesses the answers to determine whether individuals are eligible for any of 50 separate federal, state, and community-based benefit programs and services. With the help of a counselor, an applicant who comes to one agency seeking, say, emergency food assistance, might learn that he or she is eligible for fuel assistance or a range of family health services.
Streamlining the Social Service Process
The Children's Alliance adopted the program after research funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation showed that many families do not take advantage of all the benefits for which they are eligible. Focus groups involving rural families showed that information about programs such as Food Stamps, Medicaid, Child Care Assistance, and Fuel Assistance is distributed unevenly, and that many families are overwhelmed by complex application procedures and eligibility rules that vary from program to program.
Rick Silverberg, Director of the Health First Family Center in the town of Franklin, says the BOSS system already has streamlined the client "intake" process. Caseworkers and program beneficiaries save time because much of the basic information required to determine eligibility for various services can be collected only once, instead of repeatedly at each agency. In addition, because BOSS is regularly updated to account for frequent changes in regulations affecting various programs, caseworkers find it easier to stay current on eligibility requirements for scores of programs.
"Case managers say this is making their jobs much, much easier," says Silverberg.
SafetyNet-New Hampshire could do something else as well. According to Geller, the systematic record-keeping facilitated by the network could help authorities measure the overall effectiveness of the social safety net. "Right now, we don't know the cumulative effect we're having as we move people through this network of services," he says.
Pam Scheideler
Community OutreachCoordinator
(603) 271-5499
hn3300@handsnet.org
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce
National Telecommunications and Information Administration
Office of Telecommunications and Information Applications
Last Modified: 18 Dec 97