“The Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families provides $60 billion in grants annually. Its processes, however, were stuck in the paper world and ripe for innovation.”
“Ben Goldhaber, the deputy assistant secretary for administration in the Office of Administration in ACF, said the bureau doubled down to re-engineer the business processes and take advantage of emerging technologies to help better serve 3,200 grantees through 20,000 grant actions each year.”
“’The combination of technology like business intelligence, resource constraints and the notion of improving the quality of the experience for our grantees and our grants managers set the stage for us to take some hard looks at how to improve the entire environment,’ Goldhaber said in an interview. ‘One of the three big portions of the things we are doing right now is looking at non-competing continuations. There are a set of processes that make up the award of grants in their subsequent year to their initial award. If you imagine a contract, this is like an option year. These are largely pretty safe in the grant award and there isn’t a whole lot of reconsiderations. That to us signaled the best reason to take a look. We had a high reason to believe that there was going to be predictability in the award of NCCs.’”
“So ACF launched a pilot last year using business intelligence tools, robotics process automation and machine learning tools to alleviate the burden on agency grant processors…” Read the full article here.
Source: Grants process at HHS Administration for Children and Families ripe for innovation – By Jason Miller, September 10, 2020. Federal News Network.
