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Health Resources and Services Administration

How Government Connects Doctors and Nurses With Those in Need

Improving healthcare access and CX with geospatial tools and IT modernization.

In some areas of the U.S., people have limited access to nurses, doctors, dentists and mental health professionals. Over several years we’ve led the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) through digital transformation to bring efficiencies and scale to their operations. This digital strategy aligns with their core mission of improving the health of people who need it most, strengthening the health workforce and connecting them to communities in need. Our work connected more than 16,000 health providers with more than 17 million patients.

The Imperative for Change

To improve public health, Congress significantly increased funding for programs placing health professionals into local communities. Publicis Sapient was engaged to help scale the business operations and systems to deliver a more robust, needs-based health workforce. And despite scalability barriers including legacy strategies and processes, we were able to make healthcare more convenient and comprehensive through digital transformation.

The Transformative Solution

Informed by a deep understanding of their people, process and technology context, we improved the customer experience, establishing a web-based digital platform to replace a 35-year-old mainframe system and more than 23 legacy applications. This platform created a customer-centric digital environment and optimized interaction channels. The HRSA gained operational efficiencies (3x transaction volume with the same staff), completely paperless operations and millions of dollars in savings. A robust data management program was also established (leveraging data engineering, data science and data visualization) to help the client gain critical insights for strategic investments and data-driven policies to maximize impacts in communities. We applied:

  • Human-centered design
  • Agile principles
  • Adaptive planning
  • Evolutionary development
  • Continuous process improvement
  • Business process reengineering
  • Carefully orchestrated change management

The Business Impact

The HRSA is now well prepared to respond quickly to emerging public health emergencies, like the COVID-19 pandemic, during which they projected impact on specific communities and mapped associated resources to address their needs.    

They proactively influenced policies and programs that promote health equity and data-driven decision-making (DDDM), significantly increasing positive health outcomes and expanding access to medical professionals for over 17 million patients.

16,000
health providers connected to 17M patients
4x
increase of providers
3x
increase in transaction volume
$
millions of dollars saved
Prasad Bhalerao
Prasad Bhalerao
Public Sector Lead, North America