Articles from prior issues of The Advocate

July/August 2001

David Barnes, Acting Director, Division of Medical Vocational Policy, Office of Disability, SSA: Prototype Update
by Ken Forbes, Oregon DDS

Employees are generally positive about prototype. It involves a major cultural change in the DDS as MCs and Analysts must change many long-standing practices and relationships. There is a major impact on productivity for all the states that have become prototype states.

These are the early lessons SSA has learned from the prototype:
1) Focused local training is essential;
2) The quality of the FO product is critical to DDS performance;
3) There are many benefits to the first day call to the claimant, including early identification of all allegations and sources;
4) DDSs have to start phasing in changes early and;
5) There have to be alternatives for pipeline cases because reconsideration claims cannot be intermixed with prototype cases.

Different approaches are being tested for the claimant conference part of this process and they hope to identify a best approach. Mr. Barnes included a slide to specifically recount some of the concerns expressed by NADE in relation to the proposed rule for Prototype. There are some really positive aspects of prototype which need to be incorporated in the future. However, the SSA has put the process on hold to deal with the issue of costs. There are some concerns about whether the costs and savings will balance out and they need to reevaluate that. Barnes invited suggestions about what SSA could do to help us perform better. One immediate response was that individual analysts can be most productive and efficient when their case loads are the “right” size. So, Central Office could help immensely by encouraging the Regional Offices not to make the backlog such an issue that they force DDSs to overload the Analysts. Once the Analysts get overloaded, production and quality both go down.