Better Service for Those Who Need It Most

With more than 8 million residents, New York City has an extremely large job to do in providing health and human services (HHS) benefits. Along with the difficulties of serving an immensely diverse population, the city has struggled with the internal roadblocks inherent in government.

The desire to help people has always been there, but the barriers between the city's numerous HHS agencies often prevented citizens from receiving as much aid as they were qualified for. Difficulties in sharing information, lack of coordination among independent HHS programs and perceived privacy issues made it tough for New York City to achieve the outcomes social services recipients need.

Much of that has changed with the creation of ACCESS NYC, the city's central HHS Web portal for citizen-driven self-service. Using ACCESS NYC, city residents can determine potential eligibility for 35 city, state and federal human service benefit programs as well as print application forms, search for office locations, and create an account to access their information at a later time. ACCESS NYC is also designed to reach New York's diverse population by providing information in seven languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Haitian Creole.

From a simple home page, users can get information on child care, food stamps, school meals, Head Start, Medicaid, senior services, housing assistance and other programs. Using the Cúram Business Application Suite^TM, ACCESS NYC uses a "no wrong door" approach that screens applicants for HHS programs for which they may qualify, regardless of why they arrived at the site. Therefore, citizens don't need to know about a specific program in order to apply for it.

ACCES NYC empowers citizens like never before, allowing them to play an active role in their own health and human services benefits. Citizens get the help they need more quickly - and they interact with HHS programs at their own convenience through the always-available Web interface.

Improving Lives

The people who need services most are often those who have the hardest time getting to government offices to fill out applications. ACCESS NYC drastically changes that process by enabling citizens to apply for and manage social services benefits electronically.

"We can prevent the client from having to run around when they're already in a bad situation," said Kamal Bherwani, CIO for Health and Human Services and executive director of HHS-Connect in New York's Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services.

Bherwani, who oversees technology strategy and architecture for all New York City HHS agencies, said ACCESS NYC lets citizens enter demographic and financial data and quickly determine which programs they can take advantage of.

"In many cases, clients don't know which programs even exist and the details of them - and they shouldn't have to," said Bherwani. "Now they can get online, and the system will say, 'These are the seven programs you might be eligible for.' It's a very client-centric program."

ACCESS NYC is designed to be userfriendly, even for citizens with low computer literacy. The layout is easy to navigate, and each step is clearly labeled and logically ordered. The site even helps users fill out some of the applications.

Positive Outcome

Unlike many online HHS offerings, ACCESS NYC was built to provide citizendriven self-service, allowing benefits recipients to interact electronically with city agencies in meaningful ways. Perhaps a user's marital status or household composition has changed since last updating the system; that will change their status for some benefits. With ACCESS NYC, users can update their own records. In the future, clients will be able to check on the status of their applications online.

The initial approach for ACCESS NYC was to use an incremental modernization and transformation (IMT) strategy to completely transform the delivery of HHS