A ‘digital front door’ helps New Mexico boost customer experience and staff productivity
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The state’s Health Care Authority is looking to enhance its public assistance service delivery by streamlining residents’ access to program applications and call centers.
In New Mexico, state leaders recognize that many residents face barriers to accessing government services and resources. Living in a rural area, a lack of internet access or a deficiency in digital literacy can impede a person’s ability to find and navigate online resources to tap into public assistance programs. The state’s Health Care Authority is trying to close that service gap through what one official calls a digital front door.
NMHCA’s work to create a “digital front door” for residents to access various public assistance services in a single site was “a strategic, human-centered transformation of how New Mexicans access and manage health and human services and programs,” Paula Morgan, chief information officer at the New Mexico Healthcare Authority, said in an email to Route Fifty.
This year, the agency launched a mobile-friendly portal that serves as a one-stop shop that links residents to a variety of assistance programs and resources, like financial, health care and child care support. The site offers information about the programs, like eligibility rules and application requirements, and residents can apply for benefits and track their application status directly through the portal.
The one-stop portal “is more than a website or app,” Morgan said. “It represents a unified, inclusive and dignified entry point into the entire benefits ecosystem designed for accessibility and convenience.”
Since its launch, the average time to complete a benefit application has reduced from 31 minutes to 19 minutes, and application abandonment rates have declined from 40% to less than 20%, according to Morgan.
The portal’s modernization builds upon the agency’s efforts over the past several years to enhance the state’s health and human services, said Tiffany Blair, principal digital strategist and industry advisory at Salesforce.
The agency’s work began in 2020 as New Mexico officials sought out to make the state’s health and human service ecosystem less “program-centric” and more “stakeholder-centric,” she said.
One of NMHCA’s earliest priorities, for instance, was to integrate disparate customer service lines across public assistance programs like Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and other human service services into a centralized call center, she said.
With a unified customer service center, supported by the Salesforce Government Cloud Plus platform, agency staff could more efficiently access program and beneficiary data while addressing residents’ inquiries, Blair said.
Since then, NMHCA has also implemented automation to manage customer service tasks like updating a resident’s address, Morgan said. About 16% of customer contacts were automated in 2025, reducing residents’ need to wait on an agent’s response and allowing staff to prioritize inquiries requiring more in-depth assistance, she explained.
“These efforts are part of the larger modernization of New Mexico’s Medicaid systems and the overall consolidation of services under the Health Care Authority,” Morgan said. “Together, these systems will create a more streamlined, responsive and data-driven service model.”
Such efforts can help set up government agencies to adopt more advanced solutions to further improve their service delivery, like artificial intelligence, that depend on efficiently run systems and quality data sources, Blair said.
Indeed, future modernization efforts for NMHCA include considering where artificial intelligence could play a role, such as intelligent document processing of customer-submitted records, Morgan said.
The agency is also “beginning to assess the potential of agentic AI to further streamline and personalize customer interactions,” she said.
Ultimately, NMHCA aims to enable “simpler, more responsive customer service experience for New Mexicans, using the right tool at the right time to make that happen,” Morgan said.