How one state strives to reduce the burden of benefits application for residents
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Maryland residents have a new resource to digitally apply for multiple benefits programs, which one official says helps streamline the process and reduces in-person transactions.
A new online tool has more than halved the time it takes Maryland residents to apply for some social benefits.
The Maryland Benefits One Application, which went live last month, lets people digitally apply at one time for any of five programs – Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, energy assistance and Women, Infants and Children – for which they’re eligible.
Previously, they had to visit their local branches of the departments of Human Services or Health – the two state entities that oversee social benefits – to apply for each separately. The state has offered online applications for multiple benefits before if two or three aligned within a particular agency, but never comprehensively, said Pat McLoughlin, executive director of Maryland Benefits.
“They often were incredibly time-consuming,” McLoughlin said. “In many cases, they would require follow-ups at the local offices. So, you could submit a digital application but then subsequently would have to go visit the local office either to provide documents or do things like verification and validation of certain information.”
About two years ago, he and leaders from the governor’s office and the departments of Health, Human Services and IT decided it was time to make the process more efficient. They looked at how many people were eligible for more than one benefit and where the application process overlapped.
“That’s how we decided that we are going to start with a core of five benefits,” McLoughlin said. The next step was incorporating human-centered design focused on two things: a mobile-first approach because 64% of residents will use smartphones to apply and streamlined questions so that applicants could enter information, such as birthdate, that multiple services require only once.
The team worked with Code for America, a nonprofit that partners with government on technology builds. In 2023, Maryland joined Code for America’s Safety Net Innovation Lab as part of a second cohort of states, including New Mexico, New York and Washington,D.C., focusing on integrated benefits delivery.
Code for America provided “support for a lot of on-the-ground research, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis and designs,” said Francesca Costa Mendez, the organization’s director of food assistance. “We launched a [three-month] pilot last year that helped de-risk some early ideas for what might work for the new application…. A lot of it was talking to workers, understanding the policy, supporting the designs, testing those designs, making sure that the inputs are correct.”
The result is a completely digital process. Users visit MarylandBenefits.gov and can either log in to apply or take an anonymous screener to determine their eligibility for programs.
“It’s dynamic,” McLoughlin said of the process. “Based on the benefits you’re applying for, the questions are only limited to those, and, based on what you answer, the subsequent questions will change.”
What’s more, applicants can photograph and upload their documents with their phone.
“We don’t require you to have images or documents scanned or to bring them into a local office,” McLoughlin said. “We heard directly from customers who said, ‘I have to catch a bus to go to a local office,’ ‘I had to make sure that I had my kids with me,’ ‘I got to the local office and I didn’t have all my paperwork, [so] I had to go home and get it.’ There’s a lot of that type of day-to-day hassle that went into working with our caseworkers and with our offices that is now eliminated.”
The app also makes benefits workers’ jobs easier because it flags missing items and keeps applicants informed on where they are in the process, removing the need for follow-up phone calls.
The core work was in integrating the databases of the systems that manage benefits administration.
“In addition to hosting all of those applications, we also administer the state’s Master Data Management, which essentially is the mechanism that is able to allow us to start to establish that Person A in System 1 in Person B and System 2 are actually the same person, and collapsing that to make sure we have the authoritative information in both systems,” McLoughlin said. “We had already been using that, so that actually gave us a leg up in the process.”
So far, about 36,000 people have used the new application to apply for benefits. It’s likely that the app will increase the benefits that Marylanders receive as they learn through the tool that they’re eligible for more assistance, he said.
“It may not mean that one of those benefits has a rapid increase,” McLoughlin said. “What we’re more concerned about is the number of benefits one person is receiving, so if the SNAP number doesn’t increase, but we realize that WIC and cash assistance are [increasing] now because the person who was receiving just SNAP realizes they are now eligible to receive WIC and cash assistance, we’re doing a much more effective job of really helping to lift them up into a more sustainable place.”
Now that the app is live, McLoughlin said the team is working in a state of “hyper care,” making changes on a daily or weekly basis using feedback from caseworkers and applicants.
“Ultimately why we’re doing this is to try to make the lives of our customers much easier,” McLoughlin said. “If we can play a role in trying to reduce some of the burden that government puts on them, we certainly want to play a part in that.”