New Jersey county modernizes ‘broken’ benefits process

Lines for customer support at the Union County, New Jersey Department of Human Services can be long at the start of the month, while the 10-person call center must deal with 3,000 calls a day.

It’s a lot to deal with for a department that administers crucial benefits like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program in the northern part of the state. But rather than simply charge ahead with new technology like artificial intelligence, Dalton Laluces, director of outreach and advocacy at the agency, said it has taken a more considered approach.

That has meant reimagining what he called a “broken” application and approval process, which has led to rethinking how residents connect with programs they are eligible for. In these budgetarily challenged times, it’s a very different approach.

“In the past, when the environment was different, the way that we would have addressed this is, let's hire more people,” Laluces said in an interview during Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour in Washington, D.C. last week. “Let's throw more bodies, more caseworkers to process cases, more people to answer phone calls. But in today's reality, that's just not going to work, because now we have a lot of fiscal constraints. There's just not an appetite for a massive workforce right now.”

The county is now in the process of launching what it calls a “common application,” which residents fill out once before being directed to the services they are eligible for. Laluces said Union County is kicking off its common application with its workforce development arm, before then expanding it into other areas once it has been proven effective.

Getting there has been challenging for the county as, while application forms ask similar questions, their definitions may differ. For example, Laluces said SNAP and Medicaid might have different definitions of what constitutes a household, so technology has helped parse those differences. But overall, it’s designed to make the process less onerous for applicants, who have been overwhelmed in the past with the sheer number of requirements.

“What happens now is, to get Medicaid, you have to go through the Medicaid door and apply,” Laluces said. “To get SNAP you have to go through the SNAP door and apply, and you have to create an application for each one of them. And they're not easy applications. They're like filling out a mortgage. It's massive, and they ask a lot of the same questions. Why do we make people go through this more than once?”

This effort to simplify the benefits application process is expected to speed up response times and cut down on the number of calls that the county must deal with each day from residents. Lines at county offices, which Laluces compared to “going to Disneyland,” should also come down, while employees will be freed up to work more on what he described as “edge cases” that require more attention. And he said it should help the county comply with various state mandates on application processing times, which are expected to be 30 days, as well as error rates, where in some programs New Jersey is one of the leaders nationwide.

It’s part of a wider trend where state and local health and human services agencies are looking to tech and AI to streamline their workflows, speed up approvals and make applications easier for recipients to fill out. Experts said transformation need not be intimidating or involve ripping up and replacing an entire system, but can be done in smaller chunks.

“It doesn't have to be super big,” Nadia Hansen, local government industry advisor for Salesforce, said in an interview at the conference. “Sometimes we think we have to rip and replace the system, and then we're going to bring in a new system, we're going to train people, and it's going to be all great. That's not the case. Transformation starts with very basic things, like, do you have a self-service portal? Is your website more department driven or keyword search driven? Can people just find services?”

In time, Laluces said the aim is for county residents to “become self-sufficient” in dealing with the human services department, which they can only achieve by addressing the underlying issues forcing them to apply for assistance. That’s a longer-term plan, he said, and will need the agency as a whole to think of itself as a partner in residents’ lives.

“This role is more partnership-oriented, rather than transactional,” Laluces said. “You come in, we help you get situated. We get you the benefits and entitlements that you need, provide you with additional services, so that at the end of it, you get to a point where you can't qualify for our services anymore, because you make [enough]. Now these things can be done comprehensively, but how do you do it at scale? Because you can do it to, like, for 10 people, but how do you do it for 100,000? That's where technology starts to come in for us, is it will enable us to do this kind of comprehensive work at scale.”