The Job and Family Services Agencies in Delaware, Hancock, Knox, Marion, Morrow, Sandusky and Wood Counties are collaborating – with the goal of functioning as a single office to process applications for Medicaid, food stamps and other forms of assistance.
Joel Potts is the executive director of the state’s county Job and Family Services Directors Association, and says the project called Collabor8 hopes to improve efficiency by 30%. And Potts says the counties have already found ways to handle a larger workload with less state money – starting with all the forms used to verify eligibility.
“Between the counties and the state, they had over 400 different forms that were being utilized, and a lot of that information was repetitive. So through the efforts of those counties and the caseworkers, they’ve been able to winnow that down to a dozen forms. It’s less paper, it’s less cost to mail it out, it’s less cost to administer those programs and far more effective to quickly get those benefits.”
The counties expect to process 2,500 new state aid applications and 3,600 renewals each month, and will use a call center where applicants will talk not necessarily to someone in their county, but to the next person available in any of the seven counties. Applications can be completed almost instantly over the phone. Potts says county job and family services agencies are now serving twice the number of clients with half the money from the state, so the time has come to work together from the top down.
“We can’t keep administering 88 different types of systems. Part of our mantra is, ‘you can’t modernize the system without standardizing the system.’”
And Potts says another collaborative effort is coming next summer – when the Job and Family Services agencies in Vinton, Ross and Hocking Counties will launch a single county agency with a local presence in each county.