Articles from prior issues of The Advocate

November/December, 1999

How are we doing with Y2K? Great! SSA is the first federal agency to be compliant. That is at both the federal and state levels. He said the administration is not worried about whether Y2K will be a problem because the agency that produces the checks is compliant and the banks are compliant. What they do worry about is that people will panic and overcome our ability to respond to their needs. Please reassure any member of the public that the agency is in great shape relative to Y2K.

SSA is beginning to explore use of the Internet as a vehicle for transmitting medical information back and forth between the medical community and DDS. Of course this raises the whole issue of data security that SSA is just getting into. They plan to be very aggressive about pursuing a vision of electronic enhancements to the program, such as the electronic folder.

This year the workload increased dramatically in the disability program and they expect it to level off with about two million cases annually, though we are starting to see “baby boomer” cases.

Mr. Dyer talked about redesign. The concept was to make the disability program more efficient using technology, eliminating steps in each process as possible to speed the cases along. Now that we have all been involved in pilots and testing various assumptions, they are seeing the need for balance in the program. This is the balance between quality and efficiency. They now want to enhance the skills of the Disability Analyst, integrate all the steps in the process, including improved intake at the FO and better rationales from the DDS.

He said they have made a conscious decision to reinvest savings from eliminating the reconsideration step to better prepare the DDS to produce quality cases.

As of October 1, 1999, there are 10 prototypes that went live. The first case that came in as a prototype case was processed to allowance in two days. He said that the states that are participating were chosen based, among other things, on the expectation that they would be successful. He expects the prototypes to be fully operational in six months. He also intimated that national roll-out could come within the year. The Disability Claims Manager (DCM) is up and running in several sites. Based on the data they are producing, it seems clear that DCM can be done. He mentioned the early controversy about whether any single person could handle all aspects of the DCM and said that it is clear one person can handle both the financial and disability side of claims. Now they will begin to crank up expectations to see if it is practical. (He mentioned at this point that there is no secret plan to make this a federal program when the pilot ends, now that it appears the DCM can work.)

Commenting on the Office of Hearings and Appeals, he said that it is clear there will not be a drop in hearing requests any time soon. But, they are really touting the Hearing Process Improvement (HPI) plan, which will crank up production expectations while reducing staff. (Much of the description sounds like the old Adjudication Officer pilot.) He said that SSA Commissioner Ken Apfel is pushing very aggressively to make the changes in OHA. The first 37 offices are now implementing HPI and they will incorporate changes to 50 offices a year until all 137 are done.

He did say the magic incantation, which raises the hairs on the neck of all systems staff. He mentioned that RDS is being replaced with an electronic folder. This will allow cases to be moved from place to place electronically. By 2004 they want to have the Electronic Folder in place in the SSA agency and in DDSs. They also want, in the meantime, to see more faxing of data back and forth with the medical community. The return to work initiative has become more important, to the point that there are permanent staff assigned to work on the issue. They are trying to come up with ways to provide a safety zone for people to move out of the program and into a work setting.

Program integrity is another issue where a lot of effort is being expended. This involves not only catching up our lagging CDR load, but also aggressively pursuing fraud. The SSA is entering into agreements with other agencies, prisons, etc., to identify and move on cases of fraud.

What does the future hold? The workload is expected to increase again. While there will be more technology to help deal with it, the additional interaction with claimants will increase the time for each case. Better training and greater authority is expected to allow Disability Analysts to make decisions of a higher quality. They expect that overall processing time will drop. Medical information will continue to cost more and be a driving force in the budget for the agency. While they expect there to be some loss of production, SSA believes that the full-process model, now prototype, has proven that it can and will work. While money will be tight for the next few years, and we need to look forward to some tough times, it appears the pendulum is swinging toward quality.