Page 38 - FCW, November, December 2018

Public Sector Innovations
the Postal Service, the first indication data on our end would be when we scan it into our system at our offices,” Kelley said. “We have 1,000 polling places...and 30 percent of voters are dropping their ballots off at a local precinct.”
PROJECT: Ohio Benefits’ Robotic Process Automation Pilot Project Ohio Department of Administrative Services
Accelerating benefit
requests with RPA
To reduce the time state workers spend
on repetitive tasks, Ohio’s Department of Administrative Services has adopted robotic process automation in the form of bots.
The Disability Onset Alert Bot’s main job is to eliminate the backlog in the web-based Ohio Benefits system, which determines eligibility for public assistance. Operating for three hours a day, five days a week, the bot cleared a backlog of 3,000 cases in five weeks, said Deven Mehta, program director of Ohio Benefits. “Perhaps more importantly, 92 percent of the cases reviewed by the bot were processed from end to end, requiring no caseworker attention,” he added.
Baby Bot’s goal, meanwhile, is to reduce Ohio’s high infant death rate of 7.9 per 1,000 live births. The national average is 6.1. The bot was put to use in Hamilton County in May, and within two months, it had enrolled 372 newborns in a managed care plan on the same day that the county received their information, removing any delay in medical coverage. Previously, it took employees up to six days to process a newborn’s information, Mehta said.
The automation also notified caseworkers that another 316 newborns needed to be reviewed for benefits and provided a path to addressing the issue.
Baby Bot was set to be implemented in all 10 Ohio metro counties this fall, and the Disability Onset Alert Bot went statewide in mid-September.
Building on those successes, Ohio Benefits has launched the Self-Service Portal
PROJECT: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Health Care Delivery U.S. Agency for International Development
USAID is making medical deliveries via drone a reality
The last leg of the supply chain is often the trickiest, especially in rural
areas where infrastructure is not as mature and bad weather can leave areas inaccessible by ground vehicles. Drones can help solve that logistics issue, and the U.S. Agency for International Development is working with multiple countries to put the technology to use.
The agency is using a Wingcopter 178 Heavy Lift to deliver medical specimens to labs across sub-Saharan Africa. The drone, which can carry about 13 pounds, also flies medical supplies to a district hospital in Tanzania.
Delivering medical samples helps ensure that important tests are performed and analyzed in a timely manner, but some locations don’t have the infrastructure to send or receive the results electronically, so the same drone can be used to deliver hard-copy results to isolated medical centers. It might also prove useful for delivering supplies, such as anti-venom, that are expensive and often not kept on site, but are needed quickly when required.
The use of drones for imaging and mapping is common, but the use case for cargo is not as well defined, said Scott Dubin, team lead for warehousing and distribution at Chemonics International. The company is working with USAID on the Global Health Supply Chain Program.
Because of that newness, USAID has faced significant hurdles in countries that might never have had to approve anything like this before. “Getting anything done, even getting some paperwork signed in a country, can be difficult,” Dubin said. “Doing something that’s not usually done requires a lot of collaboration.”
38 November/December 2018 FCW.COM