Some find doing business on the telephone frustrating, but it’s been a saving grace as Wood County Job
and Family Services meets a new wave of challenges.
Named after eight partner counties that dropped to seven before the program launched, Collabor8 is a
group approach that aims to speed up a complicated network of programs.
Launched in January 2012, the system queues all job and family service calls for the seven counties into
one phone system, meaning someone who calls from Bowling Green, for example, likely would speak with
someone elsewhere in the state. Those counties’ JFS departments are then able to access others’ files
while taking calls from those applying for Medicaid, cash assistance and the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps.
Involved with Wood County are Delaware, Hancock, Knox, Marion, Morrow and Sandusky counties.
There are about 150,000 clients among the seven counties, which previously reported combined populations
of about 600,000.
Costs are split based upon the independent formula for JFS funding, which considers factors such as
population, poverty level and unemployment rate, to prevent smaller counties from being overburdened.
Wood County’s share in the program this year is about 22 percent.
There’s also a check that prevents counties from sharing in too much of the work, as cases are
redistributed if it’s determined any county is handling more than 110 percent of the cases that
originate from that county.
Collabor8 may not be as personal as face-to-face communication, but the change is keeping Wood County JFS
afloat in a sea of new clients.
Previously, individual case workers handled 400 to 600 clients each in exclusive work loads – if someone
had a question, they contacted a particular case worker. They would know who to call, and that person
may know the ins and outs of their applications, but they may also be working with someone else, or out
on vacation. And face-to-face interviews, while personal, used to take at least 45 minutes, and in some
cases well over an hour, said Dave Wigent, director of Wood County JFS.
"It’s very customer-centered, but it’s very inefficient," he said.
Via telephone, those times have fallen to about 30 minutes even in the midst of changes and challenges
surrounding the Affordable Care Act and the state’s Medicaid expansion.
Previously if a worker had an application interview scheduled and the client didn’t show, that person
didn’t have much to do until another client needed help, Wigent said.
"A lot of what kills your efficiency with eligibility workers is idle time."
Now telephone calls substitute for the process and rotate among counties automatically. While someone
likely won’t know their case worker, the process moves much more swiftly, Wigent said.
"At times we have gotten idle time down to 1 percent doing that, where (workers) hang up the phone
and they get the next call."
While acknowledging that some client advocacy groups have argued for a more personal approach, Wigent is
sticking by Collabor8 because it has helped about 95 percent of cases be processed within the mandated
30-day window.
"There’s probably some truth to that, but for us the biggest benefit is we feel like we can get the
client’s eligibility processed quickly and accurately and get the benefits they’re entitled to, or tell
them they’re not entitled to benefits so they can plan their life around that. Dragging that process out
doesn’t help anybody."
Since day one, the program partnered with Bowling Green State University to build in a quality-control
system that samples about 10 percent of the calls each month, Wigent said.
Collabor8 was billed as a way for departments to reduce staffing and save money while quickly attending
to clients; however, Wigent said staffing will soon be at its highest level this summer due to Medicaid
expansion, with six additional income maintenance workers needed by June, compared to two years ago.
"We’re bleeding, but Collabor8 is helping us slow the bleeding," he said.
"I believe without Collabor8, we’d be adding even more staff than we are now."
A big part of JFS work is processing eligibility documents, such as proof of residency, citizenship,
income and more, and they must be kept for at least three years, often longer.
"Just in Wood County we have 2 million documents imaged that we used to have in giant file cabinets
stacked all over the building. We have eliminated almost 100 file cabinets from the building by going
electronic," Wigent said.
And instead of each county having its own imaging and records system, those in Collabor8 share a server
in Columbus, which will save Wood County about $30,000 this year.
While the state and federal benefit system continues to get more complicated, Wigent stands by Collabor8
as a boost to what can be a sluggish process.
"From the taxpayer perspective, I think they can rest assured that we’ve ramped up the efficiency of
our system to a much higher level than it was before. But we are still having to add staff and equipment
and things as our world changes in response to (policies including the Affordable Care Act) that weren’t
part of our world when we started Collabor8," Wigent said.
"It’s had the effect I thought it would, because I’m very Wood County-centric, and I think we are
currently running one of the most efficient and accurate systems in the state."