Applying Lean Principles to Public Assistance Benefits Delivery

About the Program

Category: Human Services (Best in Category)

Year: 2017

In January of 2013, a Lean Rapid Improvement Event (RIE) was initiated to improve the delivery and timeliness of documents to eligibility technicians (ET) who process public assistance cases. The objective was to minimize hand-offs and to shorten the time for documents to be ready to be processed by eligibility technicians. One of the unique approaches that came out of the RIE was Denver County’s approach in how to tackle the insurmountable volume of paper and the various sources the documents come into the department. At the time, the department was receiving between 55,000 to 60,000 documents per month, and only 70% of documents were being scanned in 2013. The innovation from the RIE was to implement a manufacturing concept into an office environment by building an assembly line process, which was called a Flow Cell. The Flow Cell required several different approaches: • The use of data and LEAN tools to engage staff at all levels and to improve processes for internal customers and county clients • Design and restructure of office space to resemble an assembly line • Leverage staff and resources across divisions within the department to minimize document hand-offs and eliminate waste (movement) • Development of team base metrics that have direct impact to improving the customer’s experience and performance (i.e. Document Accuracy Rate and the Percentage of Work Completed in a Day). • The impact to county timeliness (processing of Applications, Redeterminations, and Changes) has statewide improvement implications. In the last 4 years, this innovation has led to documents being delivered to technicians on average within 3.5 hours. 96.58% of the documents received in a day are processed within that same day. Additionally, the accuracy rate of the work being delivered to customers is 99.92% with more than twenty-five percent of documents reviewed.