Government Technology - January 2009 - (Page ca3)

New York City Health and Human Services A massive, multiagency effort to develop holistic services uses an integrated project and portfolio management solution to weave all the threads into a strong fabric. City residents looking for services no longer need to figure out which agencies to call or visit, or waste time applying for services for which they don’t qualify. Whether they seek health care, food stamps, a rent increase exemption or a host of other services, clients can use a single portal to provide information about their households, interacting with the system in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Arabic or Haitian Creole. Through ACCESS NYC, users can obtain lists of benefits for which they might be eligible, print application forms, get the locations of agencies they need to visit and create accounts so they can access their information at another time. Under the leadership of Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs, the City of New York launched HHS-Connect, created an Office of the CIO for HHS and gave this newly created office responsibility for HHS-Connect — an initiative that will allow more than a dozen city agencies, plus community-based organizations (CBOs), to serve their clients more efficiently. HHS-Connect, an expansion of ACCESS NYC, provides a mechanism “As you handle multiple projects in ﬂight, you need to ﬁgure out how they correlate with one another.” — Kamal Bherwani, CIO, Health and Human Services, New York City N ew York City’s health and human services (HHS) agencies provide a vast array of services to millions of people. Many client households receive services from several programs and several different agencies, addressing varied aspects of their lives, such as health care, housing, children’s services, mental health and others. Traditionally each program has worked on individual issues, with little idea of what else was going on in clients’ lives or what other agencies were assisting them. Caseworkers had no way to access client information that other agencies had collected and stored in their own systems. To better serve its clients, New York City is working to break down the information silos that separate its HHS agencies and programs. The goal is to give citizens a central view of government, so they can obtain services easily. Instead of each agency addressing one issue in a vacuum — just school lunch eligibility, just housing or just health care, for example — agencies can collaborate to assist the whole person or family. “We’ll have a better idea of the correlation and the impact of different services as we deliver them to the client.” — Kamal Bherwani, CIO, Health and Human Services, New York City Taking the first step toward this goal, the city developed ACCESS NYC, a self-service portal that New Yorkers employ to determine whether they are eligible for benefits from 35 city, state and federal programs administered by a variety of agencies. “We have by far the broadest and deepest prescreening eligibility portal anywhere in the world,” said Kamal Bherwani, the city’s chief information officer (CIO) of Health and Human Services. for agencies to share client information while still safeguarding confidentiality. As part of HHS-Connect, the city is developing a new enterprise case management system for some of its agencies and integrating information systems so agencies can pool data about clients they share. It is also adding tools to ACCESS NYC that let constituents conduct transactions, such as applying for free or reduced-price school meals. It’s also building portals for employees at 3

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - January 2009

Government Technology - January 2009 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for... Stemming the Retirement Tide Getting the Picture Fact of Matter Money Trail Rays the Roof Trick or Tweet? The Modern Way to Vote Products signal:noise

Government Technology - January 2009

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