Clark County Faces an Unprecedented Demand for Benefits
While workers in many industries adapted to office shutdowns with portable devices and videoconferencing tools, those weren’t much help in Clark County.
“We live and die by hospitality in Las Vegas,” Burch says. “When you shut down the casinos, it doesn’t just affect the folks who work at the casinos. It’s the seven other jobs created by the casinos in the community.”
Clark County had been planning upgrades well before the pandemic. It uses IBM’s Cúram case management system and had been speaking with IBM about making it more of a forward- facing citizen-engagement portal. Those discussions became more concrete during the pandemic.
The system, which was built from July through October 2020, consists of two components, says Amy Wykoff, director of offering management at IBM Watson Health: the IBM Watson Health Citizen Engagement Platform, a portal that enables citizens to apply for CHAP benefits online; and the IBM Watson Assistant, an AI virtual agent that prescreens citizens to ensure they’re eligible for benefits.
“That kept a lot of unnecessary applications out of the system, which keeps unnecessary stress off the client,” Burch says.
The portal enables Clark County to dynamically create new types of programs. So, for instance, with each new stimulus package, it was able to easily input new benefit requirements into the system, Wykoff says.