Improving Customer Experiences at HHS Agencies

Today’s government health agencies have significant mission goals that are founded on enhancing the health and well-being of U.S. citizens. Meeting the mission requires a wide-range of services and solutions that enhance everything from intra-agency collaboration to public health and social service delivery.

As the consumer healthcare arena is highly complex and regulated, the federal sector also has to contend with processes and paperwork required for everything from acquisition (contract and grant lifecycle management) to distribution, compliance, online marketplaces and much more.

Keeping constituents at the forefront of all of these processes is paramount at federal health agencies. It’s also being driven by recent Executive Orders, mandates and legislation that’s making the customer experience—whether citizen or employee—even more critical for overall government success.

To enhance customer experiences, government health agencies have already streamlined processes and paperwork to improve overall time to value for meeting the expanding needs and expectations of the public and their employees—with digital transformation at the forefront. October 4, 2022, is the tenth anniversary of national CX Day. In honor of the customer experience-focused holiday, we’re sharing how the government is starting small with a customer experience strategy to ultimately drive success.

Examples of enhanced time to value

The administrative burden of paperwork costs an agency like the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) approximately $10 billion per year with more than 5,000 unique forms.

To help counter this challenge, there are many use cases and examples for how agencies can move away from cumbersome paperwork and increase time to value for various programs and efforts with Docusign CLM. Much of these efforts support new human-centered design approaches at government health agencies.

For example, Docusign played a role in the integrated systems that enabled the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to expedite its distribution of $175 billion in grants for the Provider Relief Fund, which supports families, workers and healthcare providers in the battle against the pandemic.

As a result, the agency was able to shorten its grant distribution process from three to four months to as little as five days. To this day, the system has never been down.

In addition, one particular agency—one of the largest funders in the federal government—enhanced its overall contract lifecycle management effort, providing advanced opportunities for both the agency and for those applying for resources.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces also now represent a large portion of collaboration between payers, providers and the public. By facilitating improvements in these processes, it’s possible to streamline hundreds of millions of transactions each year.

When it comes to state-level ACA marketplaces, Docusign created a custom solution that automates processes for reviewing and approving agreements from the entities that provide Californians with access to ACA-qualified health plans. There are also new grant and funding opportunities for modernizing the technologies that support these marketplaces.

For example, twenty one states received new grants under the 2021 CMS State Marketplace Modernization fund, which is part of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act. The grants will help state-level ACA marketplaces to modernize or update any system, program, or technology to meet all government compliance requirements. One of the key citizen-focused requirements is increased financial assistance for taxpayers enrolled in a Qualified Health Plan (QHP).

Seamless integration with common government platforms

To help further enhance customer experience efforts at government health agencies, Docusign has more than 400 pre-built integrations with other products for managing all data and processes.

For example, numerous agencies use Salesforce for managing many parts of these various use cases—especially for large-scale projects like managing ACA marketplaces. Salesforce enables agencies to leverage structured data. An overlay with Docusign allows agencies to better manage unstructured data, which is very common in data-heavy health applications.

Other partnership examples include the integration between Docusign eSignature and transaction management solutions from Pega Systems, which allow government health customers to automate entire business processes digitally. The integration between ServiceNow and eSignature also simplifies all paperwork, and connects the contract processes of agency back-office teams within one platform.

Overall, Docusign is embarking on new partnerships with government systems integrators to further bring new capabilities for streamlining processes for improving the customer experience in the government health arena.

Partnering with Steampunk to execute digital transformation 

Joey Pahira, Customer Relationship Executive – Health & Human Services at Steampunk, has an intimate understanding of the processes and requirements that government institutes have. He comes from NIH, where he held his first job.

Pahira leverages his experience and understanding of institutes like NIH to build tailored digital solutions for the government. “At Steampunk, we view Docusign as an integral part of modernizing legacy, paper-intensive processes into true digital solutions that not only delight customers, but also allow organizations to glean more insights out of their documents. By leveraging our innovative Design Intelligence® framework, we, along with our strategic digital solution partners like Docusign—and in collaboration with our government clients—focus on generating human-centered solutions that utilize these forward-leaning features,” he says.

Steampunk’s Design Intelligence® brings together the unique approach of integrating human-centered design, agile methodologies and technical capabilities to define, create, and deliver mission critical solutions that are grounded in the understanding of the people who use them.

Docusign for government agencies

Docusign helps government health agencies focus on their missions instead of paperwork, and deliver a better citizen experience, reduce costs and streamline processes. Docusign serves over 3,000 local, state and government public sector organizations.

In addition, Docusign eSignature and Docusign CLM are authorized at the FedRAMP Moderate Impact Level, and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has granted Docusign a Provisional Authorization for Impact Level 4 (IL-4).