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AI-augmented human services

by Tiffany Fishman, William D. Eggers
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    3 minute read 30 October 2019

    AI-augmented human services Using cognitive technologies to transform program delivery

    3 minute read 31 October 2019
    • Tiffany Fishman United States
    • William D. Eggers United States
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    • Understanding AI and its application in human services
    • Potential savings from automation

    Just as artificial intelligence is transforming the consumer experience, it, and other emerging technologies, can help health and human service agencies deliver better, faster services.

    In the consumer realm, technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI) are slowly changing the way we manage everyday tasks. Take the driving app Waze, for example. Waze uses crowdsourced data, social networking conversations, and cognitive learning to help shave time off daily commutes by providing the most efficient route based on current conditions and individual driving preferences.

    Learn more

    Explore the HHS Innovator's Playbook

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    Or consider products like Nest. Gone are the days of paying to heat or cool your house while no one’s home. When people are at home, Nest learns what temperature household occupants prefer at different times of the day, automatically adjusting home thermostats to help users save money on their energy bills.1

    Meanwhile, intelligent personal assistants, such as Siri®2 and Alexa, have helped reduce the time required to carry out routine tasks such as turning off the lights or ordering dinner, enabling their users to refocus limited attention on higher-order tasks.3

    Similar AI technologies can be put to use in human services, to help agencies cut costs, improve decision-making, free up significant labor hours for more critical tasks, and deliver better, faster services. ​

    Understanding AI and its application in human services

    To better understand AI’s potential application in human services, it is critical to learn about some of the key automation and AI-based technologies that are impacting our lives. These technologies include robotic process automation (RPA), rule-based systems, machine learning, computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and robotics (figure 1).

    Robotic process automation (RPA) and key cognitive technologies

    Government entities are putting these technologies to work today in an effort to reduce the administrative burden on caseworkers, address long wait times, triage high caseloads based on risk, and free up staff time to deal with more complex cases (figure 2).

    Reducing application processing time through RPA

    Often caseworkers must manually verify the eligibility of beneficiaries by fetching data from multiple systems. Take San Diego County, for example. County caseworkers use two different systems for eligibility verifications. The first system stores all the required documents to verify eligibility. The second system has 500 different application forms, and each form or combination of forms requires different documents. The problem is that the two systems do not communicate with each other. As a result, caseworkers open forms from one system and then look for supporting documents in the other system. Since there are 500 forms, these requirements create hundreds of business rules, which a caseworker has to verify manually. The process is complex and consumes huge amounts of caseworkers’ time.4

    To automate the process and connect both systems, the county deployed RPA software. The software automatically looks at the open forms on a caseworker’s screen, sifts through the verification fields, identifies relevant documents, and then pulls up those documents from the other system. The entire manual task was replaced with a single keystroke. As a result of using RPA, the time it takes to approve a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) application was cut from 60 days to less than a week.5

    Using virtual assistants to reduce workloads

    Australia’s Department of Human Services (DHS) is using cognitive technologies to help reduce its staff workload. The department deployed an internal virtual assistant called Roxy to answer queries from case-processing officers related to the rules and regulations of the department’s programs. Roxy uses machine learning and natural language processing to understand human language and respond to requests.6 Roxy is currently responding to more than 78 percent of the questions being put to it.7 Prior to Roxy, DHS staff would call human experts for assistance. Now human experts only get involved in complex queries.8 According to former DHS chief technology officer Charles McHardie, "It's been quite successful at reducing their workload."9

    Flagging child welfare cases at high risk for child fatalities

    Oklahoma’s Department of Human Services has used cognitive technology to help identify child welfare cases most likely to lead to child fatalities. The department partnered with Eckerd Kids, whose software uses machine learning to predict cases with a high probability of child fatalities. Factors such as a child under the age of three, intergenerational abuse, young parents, mental health problems, and a history of substance abuse tend to be correlated with a high risk of child fatalities.9 Once high-risk cases get flagged, they go through a detailed review, and the input is shared with front-line staff so that they can establish a course of action that abates risk and improves outcomes.11 This helps field staff target investigations based on risk rather than relying on random sampling.

    Human services can use AI to address multiple pain points

    Potential savings from automation

    Today, typical human services employees allocate their labor among a “basket” of tasks. By breaking jobs into individual activities and analyzing how suitable each is to automation, we can project the number of labor hours that could potentially be freed up by investing in AI-based technologies. Our analysis of human service agencies in a large Midwestern state found that automation could yield time savings of up to 34 percent. This amounts to 3 million hours freed up, yielding potential annual savings of US$73 million (figure 3). At the low end of the investment spectrum, automation could still save 305,000 hours annually, with potential savings of US$7 million.

    AI-based technologies are already having a profound impact on consumers. These technologies could be further applied to human services programs to help reduce backlogs, cut costs, overcome resource constraints, free caseworkers to spend more time with families, inject intelligence into scores of processes and systems, and handle many other tasks humans can’t easily do on our own.

    It’s highly unusual for a business improvement to increase speed, enhance quality, and reduce costs at the same time, but AI-based technologies offer that possibility. For human services workers, it could mean a future where vast amounts of their time are freed up thanks to automation, their effectiveness is enhanced, and their capabilities extended with machine learning.

    Acknowledgments

    Cover image by: Alex Nabaum

    Endnotes
      1. Google Nest, “Google Nest Learning Thermostat,” accessed on October 10, 2019. View in article

      2. Innovation in health and human services: AI-augmented human services by the Deloitte Center for Government Insights is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Apple and Apple Watch are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. View in article

      3. Please note that AI-augmented human services is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. View in article

      4. Automation Anywhere, “San Diego County—Health and human services agency,” September 29, 2014. View in article

      5. Automation Anywhere, “Webinar: How to deploy robotic process automation at scale,” May 14, 2015. View in article

      6. Microsoft News Center, “Australia embraces cloud and AI to deliver a new class of intelligent solutions says Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella,” November 16, 2016. View in article

      7. Australian Government Digital Transformation Agency, “Address to the AIIA: Gavin Slater,” August 3, 2017. View in article

      8. Allie Coyne, “DHS new front-line will be virtual assistants,” iTnews, December 19, 2016. View in article

      9. Ibid. View in article

      10. Kathleen Hickey, “Saving children, one algorithm at a time,” GCN, July 26, 2016. View in article

      11. Ibid. View in article

    Show moreShow less

    Topics in this article

    State Government , Public Sector , Artificial intelligence (AI) , Government , Cognitive technologies

    ​Health and Human Services

    For more than 45 years, Deloitte state health and human services professionals have worked side by side with state agencies. Our mission is to help you achieve your mission—protecting and improving the health, safety, and well-being of our fellow citizens. We are focused on helping you improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of state services and benefits. Our breadth of offerings includes: eligibility and service integration, state health care, child welfare, childcare and early learning, and many others.

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    Tiffany Fishman

    Tiffany Fishman

    Senior Manager | Deloitte Services LP

    Tiffany is a senior manager with the Deloitte Center for Government Insights. Her research and client work focuses on how emerging issues in technology, business, and society will impact organizations. She has written extensively on a wide range of public policy and management issues, from health and human services reform to the future of transportation and the transformation of higher education. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including Public CIO, Governing, and EducationWeek.

    • tfishman@deloitte.com
    • +1 571 882 6247
    William D. Eggers

    William D. Eggers

    Executive director

    Bill is the executive director of Deloitte Services LP’s Center for Government Insights where he is responsible for the firm’s public sector thought leadership. His latest book is Delivering on Digital: The Innovators and Technologies that are Transforming Government (Deloitte Insights, 2016). His eight other books include The Solution Revolution: How Government, Business, and Social Enterprises are Teaming up to Solve Society’s Biggest Problems (Harvard Business Review Press 2013). The book, which The Wall Street Journal calls “pulsating with new ideas about civic and business and philanthropic engagement,” was named to ten best books of the year lists. His other books include The Washington Post best seller If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government (Harvard Business Press, 2009), Governing by Network (Brookings, 2004), and The Public Innovator’s Playbook (Deloitte Research 2009). He coined the term Government 2.0 in a book by the same name. His commentary has appeared in dozens of major media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

    • weggers@deloitte.com
    • +1 571 882 6585

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