“Interoperability” refers to systems’ ability to interact with each other to share data so that a customer is connected with as many benefits as possible in an efficient way. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was originally intended to be interoperable, but this has not occurred yet. Promoting interoperability in the ACA is imperative, as it would help alleviate food insecurity through automatic benefits enrollment.
Better Rules utilizes multidisciplinary teams that include people skilled in policy, legal, business rules, programming, and service design working together in an iterative fashion to develop rules. Several outputs are produced using this approach, each offering an opportunity that can be fed back into that iterative process and re-used to solve other issues.
Digitizing public benefits policy will make the biggest impact for administrators and Americans, but only if it happens at the highest level of government.
The team conducted experiments to determine whether clients would be responsive to proactive support offered by a chatbot, and identify the ideal timing of the intervention.
In this presentation, Pia Andrews explores how open source legislation as code can be a public utility to increase transparency, and enable better implementation and testing of government systems.
This article explores how AI and Rules as Code are turning law into automated systems, including how governance focused on transparency, explainability, and risk management can ensure these digital legal frameworks stay reliable and fair.
At Rules as Code Demo Day Executive Director Zareena Mayn and Chief Technology Officer Dize Hacioglu of mRelief demoed the code for their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility screener. mRelief is a women-led team that provides a web-based and text message-based SNAP eligibility screener to all 53 states and territories that participate in SNAP. They demonstrated how they have modularized their code to host federal program rules and state-specific rules.
The Policy Rules Database (PRD), developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the National Center for Children in Poverty, consolidates complex rules for major U.S. federal and state benefit programs and tax policies into a standardized, easy-to-use format. This database allows researchers to model public assistance impacts, simulate policy changes, and analyze benefits cliffs across various household scenarios using common rules and language across different programming platforms.
