Hack Your Bureaucracy

An analysis of phone calls showed that over 98 percent of people were calling to check on the status of their claim—information that the call center agents couldn’t actually provide. A detailed claim status service was part of the planned modernization effort, but had not yet begun. Instead, Marina and her team talked to both real claimants and claims specialists to translate the existing system status alerts (which were mostly three-digit codes) into plain-language, easy-to-understand sentences. They then exported an existing report of these status codes once a night to an external website hosted in a secure cloud environment, which could scale up to meet high-traffic demands that the mainframe could not. In under two weeks, millions of Californians went from waiting on hold all day to using a self-service website