How Maryland embraced government efficiency
GovExec staff photo by Zaid Hamid
By
Chris Teale
The state has looked to improve its service delivery both for its residents and the employees who administer those programs, including in major initiatives like benefits.
One year ago, Maryland launched a single digital application portal for five core benefits, and in the 12 months since has gained 500,000 users while also reducing how long it takes residents to receive assistance.
The Maryland Benefits One Application 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 — they are eligible for.
Previously, applicants had to visit local offices for the Departments of Health or Human Services, which are the two agencies that administer those benefits, and apply for each separately. Or the state had online applications for multiple benefits if two or three were aligned within a particular agency.
For state leaders, the effort illustrates what can be done to make government operate more efficiently, as it meant bringing together several disparate programs that often have overlapping eligibility for residents. And it meant easing the application process for those residents, which was fraught with difficulties in the past.
“We have improved our resident experience: it’s much more efficient to deliver, we don't have to employ as many caseworkers because it's not so complex to review these cases, and we're better able to protect everyone's data because it's all in one place,” Maryland Information Technology Secretary Katie Savage said during an on-stage interview at the GovExec Efficiency Summit last week in Washington, D.C.
States have wrestled with the idea of making their governments more efficient for years, with some inspired at least partly by the Department of Government Efficiency at the federal level. But others have reflected on how government efficiency should be focused on better delivery of services and making the administration of those services easier, rather than reducing employee headcount, and they are using technology to help do so.
But Savage warned it is not as simple as to just “lift and shift” by using new technology on old processes. Instead, she said leaders have to be cognizant of how they are improving a resident’s experience, while at the same time consolidating to improve cybersecurity and causing less strain on public finances.
One area of success for the state has been in reducing its website sprawl and reimagining how services are presented online. Too many governments force residents and businesses to know which agencies they need to engage with to get something done, rather than being focused on what users are trying to achieve and then working backwards to connect them with the relevant services.
“If you've tried to open a small business, for example, you might need to get a license and permit from the Department of Labor, and, depending on the category, you might need to get something from the Department of Health,” Savage said. “If you're building something, you might need to get something from the Department of Environment, and on and on. Part of reducing the sprawl for us has also meant, especially with regard to websites, how can we think about the experience from a user journey perspective?”
Savage said the state has also worked to make many of its back-office contracts and processes more efficient, including by consolidating what were 13 different Microsoft contracts across government, and by ending support for various legacy applications where possible. Artificial intelligence, too, presents an interesting opportunity for the state in a wide variety of public-facing and employee-facing areas. But Savage warned again against another “lift and shift” moment and called on the state to use that emerging technology as another way to rethink how work gets done, including in the development life cycle that could be made even more agile.
“I want to make sure we don't miss the opportunity of reimagining what the system should be now,” she said. “But at the same time, I think it could really accelerate the way we understand what a legacy system is and does and what it could be.”
Those efforts with AI could be crucial in the benefits space, not only to reduce the state’s payment error rates, but also to help answer caseworkers’ questions and help them determine eligibility. Alongside that, improving the user experience could be critical too, she said.
“In a lot of the case management systems that we operate in the state, users don't have a great experience because they answer the question wrongly or put in the word incorrectly, and then they're routed back to the beginning,” Savage said. “I think there's a really interesting case for agents to help steer them in the right direction.”