Medicaid phone wait times drop significantly

At last week’s Medicaid Council meeting we heard about strong progress toward reducing phone wait times. Average wait times dropped 52% from April to May while abandoned calls fell 42%. By the last week of June, average wait times were down to 11 minutes from 57 minutes in March. The improvements resulted in 6,466 more calls answered in May over April. The improvements came from an internal review of business processes and included enhancements in training, maximizing DSS office staff time use, standardizing information that managers use to direct work, eliminating duplicate imaging, and improving information for consumers to help them navigate the system more easily. The shifts to processing staff is being carefully monitored to ensure it does not impact other important work. Interestingly, phone wait time improvement preceded implementation of the reforms. DSS is not resting on its laurels and has plans to continue improvements and monitor to sustain the progress to date.