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Realizing the promise of no wrong door

Using human-centered design to make HHS more intuitive

States that employ a human-centered design approach to health and human services are offering residents a better, more intuitive experience.

State governments today provide a wide array of health and human services benefits, often delivered through different agencies—each with a specific mission, dedicated staff, and disparate data and technology systems. While this may be an effective way to run state programs from an administrative perspective, the typical resident doesn’t understand how agencies are organized, which programs are available, and which agency administers each program. Nor should they. Imagine how frustrated you’d be if you needed to understand the different business units of your bank to deposit or withdraw money.

Relying on residents to “figure it out” is no longer acceptable. There’s a better, more human-centered way to engage residents as they discover, apply for, and maintain health and human services benefits. This approach focuses not on the organizational structure of the state and its agencies, but on residents—empowering them with the knowledge and services they need. Human-centered design elevates the human experience to not only transform how agencies serve residents, but also deliver tangible impact to states.

While the movement to apply human-centered design to health and human services is over a decade in the making, thanks to increased federal funding made available through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, states have a window of opportunity to make their services more user-friendly and efficient.

What good design looks like

Thoughtful, human-centered design can address residents’ challenges head-on, with a particular emphasis on three foundational design principles: Make it intuitive, make it easy, and make it clear. Here’s how each of these principles might be brought to life in a one-stop shop for health and human services benefits:

Getting from here to there

So, how do you make this vision a reality and create a truly resident-centered experience? The key is not to start with technology. Start instead with your agency’s goals, whether those include driving enrollment, increasing digital adoption, lowering churn, reducing call center volumes, improving customer experience, or saving time for employees. Measure your baseline performance so you can track the impact of your efforts against these goals.

Several states have used human-centered design to improve the way residents apply for and receive health and human services. The following are three examples.

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Kentucky: kynect benefits
See how Kentucky improved the user experience for residents accessing benefits—and dramatically increased digital adoption and engagement.

The Commonwealth of Kentucky took a proactive, human-centric approach when it designed a new self-service portal that residents would use to apply for and manage their benefits. The Commonwealth wanted to give residents a better experience while also improving program performance, driving digital adoption, and increasing resident engagement.

Kentucky launched the new portal in October 2020. Within two months, the Commonwealth nearly doubled the percentage of residents who completed applications by their deadlines. Digital adoption increased by 77 percent, with the number of online portal accounts increasing from 32,000 to 57,000 by November. Residents opened 37 percent of e-mails received through the system, compared with the government average of 21 percent. The portion of residents who not only opened the e-mails but also clicked on the content was 17 percent, more than four times the government average of 4 percent.

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Michigan: MI Bridges
Michigan used human-centered design to enable residents to apply to and manage benefits in six state programs with a single sign-on.

Michigan’s self-service benefits delivery portal, MI Bridges, provides a single entry point for discovering local resources and applying to six state programs: healthcare coverage; food assistance; cash assistance; child development and care; state emergency relief; and women, infants, and children (WIC). Residents can use a single form to apply for all programs; the portal dynamically hides or shows questions as needed. Residents can also use the portal to view their active benefits, report changes to their cases, reapply for existing benefits, download letters sent by the department, and upload documents. In addition, the system can proactively refer individuals to programs based on information they provide and connect them to help they might need. The portal has more than 3 million registered client users and more than 950 community partner users.

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Texas: Your Texas Benefits
By employing human-centered design, Texas created a robust mobile app that enables residents to effortlessly access and manage their benefits.

In 2019, Texas embarked on a project to enhance Your Texas Benefits, the website and mobile app that citizens use to apply for and manage state benefits. The goal was to better meet citizen needs and deliver a better customer experience. The research behind this project included: interviews with clients, local office employees, community partners, and help desk employees; analyses of app store ratings and reviews, user sessions and screen views; a usability study; and a content inventory/audit on 23 targeted website screens.

Among other improvements, the mobile application features of Your Texas Benefits enable residents to use their phones to capture document images to submit as part of their cases, rather than delivering them in person or by mail. The key is to help users successfully complete the transaction by themselves without needing to call or visit a field office.

Your Texas Benefits is one of the most successful publicly available government apps of all time, with 74% of document uploads being done via phone, more than 1M downloads across mobile platforms, and a monthly user base of over 900K Texans.

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    Realizing the Promise of No Wrong Door

    Human-centered design is transforming health and human services engagement, promoting healthier communities, and making better use of government resources.

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    Get in touch

    Phong Huynh
    Principal, Customer & Marketing
    Deloitte Consulting LLP
    phhuynh@deloitte.com

    Jordan Schneidman
    Principal, Customer & Marketing
    Deloitte Consulting LLP
    jschneidman@deloitte.com
     

    Bill Gordon
    Managing Director, Customer & Marketing
    Deloitte Consulting LLP
    wgordon@deloitte.com
     

    Kate Holman
    Senior Manager, Customer & Marketing
    Deloitte Consulting LLP
    kateholman@deloitte.com
     

    Tiffany Fishman
    Senior Manager, Deloitte Center for Government Insights
    Deloitte Services LP
    tfishman@deloitte.com
     

    		  
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