This landscape analysis examines data, design, technology, and innovation-enabled approaches that make it easier for eligible people to enroll in, and receive, federally-funded social safety net benefits, with a focus on the earliest adaptations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Medicaid enrollees must renew their eligibility every 12 months, resulting in extensive “churn,” whereby eligible people continuously cycle on and off of Medicaid instead of remaining continuously enrolled. States can use detailed SNAP income data to reduce churn and thus reduce the burden on beneficiaries and agencies.
Although Medicaid and SNAP participants are automatically income-eligible for WIC, many don’t enroll. Pilot projects in four states have shown that matching data across programs to identify these families and conducting outreach to them can increase WIC enrollment.
Paper presenting preliminary lessons learned about SNAP churn derived from states participating in the Work Support Strategies project. It defines churn and outlines its consequences, explores approaches to measuring churns and looks at possible approaches to reduce churn.
Applying UX research methods, the City of San Jose worked to improve how low-income and non-English speaking residents engaged with My San Jose, a website and mobile app for residents to report neighborhood issues to cities. They used a Spanish and Vietnamese translator to conduct interviews with target users, then detailed major findings and corresponding recommendations in this report.
Study by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget assessing methods for determining whether agency policies and actions create or exacerbate barriers to full and equal participation by eligible individuals. This study followed the Executive Order on racial equity.
In June 2020, the state implemented an innovative and entirely virtual vendor selection process to evaluate these solutions under the direction of the Colorado Digital Service (CDS).
