As part of its mission to rehome families affected by homelessness, Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services is focused on reducing as many pain points and lengthy processes for those who use its services as feasibly possible.
Seeking to deliver a greater quality of service to Victorians in need, the department turned to Microsoft Azure partner CNI to streamline its housing application processes.
The software and systems integrator was able to help the DHHS reduce the number of interfaces Victorian families seeking accommodation engage with from 15 to one.
It's a significant streamlining that reduces the pains of searching, helps rehome people faster, and, by extension, reduces the suffering associated with homelessness, domestic violence from living in unsafe environments and depression-related-suicide.
The new Victorian Housing Register is designed to make applying for social housing assistance easier. Bringing together all public and community housing waiting lists into a single place. The service means Victorians in need of housing only have to provide their details once, instead of contacting multiple individual agencies.
A new L17 Referral and Triage Portal allows for the secure transmission of customer information between agencies, a step that CNI says has replaced more than 70,000 faxes each year.
A point of pride for the DHHS, the L17 Referral and Triage Portal was referenced by Department of Human Services chief information officer Steve Hodgkinson in a recent article, where he highlighted the services’ “referrals from Victoria Police to be efficiently and accurately triaged and allocated to agencies, with all authorised parties able to see who the referral has been sent to, check on status and report on outcomes”.
In building the production-ready platform, CNI had to meet strict security, governance and control requirements, stipulated by the DHHS. The system integrator has measured its success by giving the DHHS the ability to adopt an agile development methodology, being able to deploy new customer information systems within 2-3 months, rather than every 12 months.
Since adopting CNI’s platform, the DHHS has released public-facing applications to help Victorians deal with: family violence, housing, temporary accommodation, health protection, financial assistance and others.
CNI said the DHHS’s Victorian Housing register was a particularly powerful example of customer outcomes being improved by digital transformation. It said the service had managed 37 percent, or 5086 applications since it went live, and that about half of the user sessions were processed on a mobile phone.
The figures represent a dramatic shift from the previously end-to-end reliance on human case workers. Now, customers are experience reduced waiting times, and reduced overall costs. Case works are being freed up from attending a call centre, top actively providing critical in-community services.
CNI is a finalist in the 'Customer Experience' category in the 2018 CRN Impact Awards. For a list of all finalists and further details on the awards, please head to the CRN Impact Awards hub. The awards take place during the CRN Pipeline conference. You can get more information and purchase tickets here.
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