Castilla y León regional government adapts quickly to new laws

The regional government of Castilla y León, one of Spain’s 17 autonomous regions, administers a broad range of social programs through its Social Services agency. More than 50,000 people benefit from the agency’s social assistance programs for the disabled and elderly, and for child protection.

Keeping pace with changing regulations

Spain’s recent passage of a law promoting care and autonomy for dependent people, including the elderly and disabled, dramatically increased the number of cases that the region’s Social Services agency had to process. The law not only introduced new social benefits, but backed them with precisely defined eligibility criteria. However, because data about citizens was kept in various offices, eligibility verification was often inconsistent. Additionally, agency staff found that citizens who were eligible for services were not always treated the same way for each comparable case due to inconsistencies in the process.

Applying advanced case management strategies

To support the new law and improve services to qualifying citizens, the Social Services agency launched its new Social Services Unified Access System (SAUSS) that acts as a single point of contact for citizens and enables agency staff to manage case progression and resolution consistently across all offices. The SAUSS project included the application of advanced case management strategies using IBM® Software to create a centralized process-oriented management system for granting benefits, automating the agency’s work and shortening service delivery. The solution includes the following software products:

• IBM FileNet® Content Manager software provides a central repository for citizen information that can be shared by case managers across all branches and offices, thus eliminating redundant information.
• IBM FileNet Business Process Manager automates business processes to help ensure equal and timely service and payments to all eligible citizens.
• IBM WebSphere® ILOG® JRules business rule management system (BRMS) software facilitates the development, deployment and maintenance of the business rules that govern the complex decisions to be taken in the process. For instance, a rule-based decision service is used to score applications and assess eligibility.
• MicroStrategy software is used for statistics and scorecard balancing.

“We identified the advanced case management capabilities of IBM Software, including business rule management, as key in helping us cope with regulatory and internal policy changes,” says José María Molina, Project Director, IT Department Social Services, Social Services Management, Family and Equal Opportunity Council, Junta de Castilla y León. “We chose IBM Software because of the depth of its functionality, robustness, and ease of use and integration.”

The SAUSS system was assembled by Thales, a system integrator and IBM Business Partner. Two people—one from Thales and the other from the agency—were primarily responsible for developing the rules of the system. They prepared for the project by attending an IBM Software training course given by IBM Software Education Services. In all, the project lasted one year. The system was developed to run in a Java™ environment with Microsoft® Windows® 2000.

Flexibility to support changing laws

Because all business rules governing the new system are stored in a central repository, the agency’s IT department no longer has to recode applications associated with SAUSS when new policies and regulations are passed. The agency’s policy managers can access the rule repository through a web-based interface to review, modify, test and redeploy rules to implement changes directly. Furthermore, as the decision logic is managed separately from business processes, policy changes can be implemented without requiring any changes to the processes which rely on them. In addition, policies can now be changed in one place for use by multiple processes and applications, reducing maintenance time and cost.

Handling a greater number of cases

The new system has greatly improved the productivity of approximately 1,500 agency and municipality personnel. It allows them to more easily handle the greater number of cases resulting from the introduction of the new law. Because the system automates the processing of most of the paperwork, agency staff can instead focus their time on handling exceptional cases. The solution’s powerful, user-friendly interface allows case managers to review, validate and maintain cases directly to confirm compliance with legal requirements.

Even though the number of cases has increased significantly, each application is processed much faster, enabling the agency to deliver services in far less time on average. What’s more, the agency can easily confirm that transparent and fair decisions are applied through consistent scoring and rules-based eligibility criteria across all agency centers and municipalities.

“By combining the strengths of IBM Software and services, we are dramatically reducing the time to process benefits, allowing the staff to put more focus on handling exceptional cases. As each application is processed faster and more accurately, the agency can now deliver social benefits more efficiently,” says Molina.

For more information

Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at: ibm.com/software/data/advanced-case-management

For more information on Thales, visit: www.thales-is.com

For more information on Junta de Castilla y León, visit: www.jcyl.es

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