By Eric Bradner, Evansville Courier & Press
INDIANAPOLIS - Southwestern Indiana is where the state's human services agency plans to launch a new system for determining who is eligible for benefits such as Medicaid and food stamps.
In October, Gov. Mitch Daniels' administration fired IBM Corp., the lead contractor on a 10-year, $1.34 billion deal, and announced that it would abandon the much-criticized modernization effort and start its efforts to upgrade the way welfare applications are processed anew.
The new welfare eligibility system, which is set to be launched in January, will be the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration's latest attempt to do just that.
The "hybrid system" incorporates the face-to-face interaction of old paper-based ways and the technological advances of the modernized version in hopes of reducing the amount of time it takes to make eligibility determinations and minimizing the number of errors.
It will be piloted in a 10-county area that includes Vanderburgh, Warrick, Gibson, Posey, Daviess, Dubois, Knox, Perry, Pike and Spencer counties.
"We want to fix the system. We are going to fix the system," FSSA Secretary Anne Murphy said days ago in an interview with the Courier & Press. "We can't go any longer with the timeliness being slow, particularly in a recession when a lot of people are hurting."
The key difference between the scrapped modernization effort and the new hybrid system is how applicants' cases are managed.
Under the system being piloted in Southwestern Indiana, 20 workers will be transferred from state service centers into county offices, and those who seek benefits will do so by working through those staffing their county offices.
Those county offices will have "teams" so that one person will process applications and a different person will make eligibility determinations - a step FSSA spokesman Marcus Barlow said reduces fraud.
Those who wish to complete forms online or fax or mail documents will still be able to do so, and over-the-phone assistance will be available as well.
But rather than requiring callers to go through a statewide call center where staffers often couldn't provide much help, those who need assistance will be able to call FSSA and be automatically transferred to their local offices for help.
Meanwhile, in hopes of catching problems early, the hybrid system will formalize an arrangement that has loosely existed for months already by bringing social service advocates and health care providers together for regular meetings to discuss concerns that arise.
The agency's management structure will also be overhauled to give regional managers more day-to-day control.
Though the IBM contract was cancelled, other private deals remain. However, Murphy said that by firing IBM, the state of Indiana was essentially substituted in as the project manager moving forward.
Under the hybrid plan, private contracts are being renegotiated and are generally for a shorter time period than they were before.
Social services advocates who have been briefed on the hybrid plan said they are pleased with its overall structure.
"I'm very encouraged," said John Dickerson, the executive director of Indianapolis-based ARC of Indiana, which helps Hoosiers with developmental disabilities.
"It's a major undertaking, but they're really addressing the timeliness issue, the accountability issue and the need for face-to-face local contact."
Right now, 59 of Indiana's 92 counties are on the modernized system while the remaining 33 are still using the old, paper-based version.
Counties that are not part of the pilot will remain on the system they are currently on until further changes are announced.
Dickerson said starting with the pilot "gives them a chance to test the concepts, make sure we're measuring what's working and what's not working."