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Strategic Objective

Enhance Employment Support Programs and Create New Opportunities for Returning Beneficiaries to Work

Strategic Objective

Lead Office: Office of Retirement and Disability Policy

Themes:

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Overview
Progress Update

Overview

Progress Update

We took the following steps in FY 2015 to enhance employment support programs and create new opportunities for returning beneficiaries to work (see Key Initiatives and Performance Measures for more details):

Initiated the national evaluation of the PROMISE project;
Promoted the use of Ticket to Work program to disabled beneficiaries:
- Enhanced marketing campaign;
- Resumed targeted ticket mailings in April 2015; and
- Designed virtual job fairs to connect beneficiaries with federal contractors.
Held a technical panel to develop a process to identify individuals with mental illnesses who are at risk of becoming beneficiaries; and
Implemented new real-time online services to employment support service providers to assist them in providing better service to beneficiaries returning to work.

Next Steps

Continue evaluating and overseeing work incentive programs:
- PROMISE project; and
- Ticket to Work.

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Strategic Goals

Strategic Goal:

Serve the Public through a Stronger, More Responsive Disability Program

Statement: No Data Available

Strategic Objectives

Improve the Quality, Consistency, and Timeliness of Our Disability Decisions

Statement:No Data Available

Description:

Our employees and State partners in the DDSs are committed to balancing the need to make high-quality, accurate, and consistent decisions with the objective of decreasing the time claimants must wait for decisions at all levels.

We are using a new analytical tool that provides many of our ALJs and support staff with MI on their work relative to the rest of their office, their region, and the Nation. The information we gain from this analysis will help us to improve the way we review and decide disability cases, making our process simpler and more efficient.

We will continue our partnerships with other agencies to further modernize key aspects of our disability process. These include our partnership with the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine to revise our disability guidelines to reflect the most up-to-date medical knowledge; our collaboration with the Department of Labor to update our occupational information; and our partnership with the research community, for example the Disability Research Consortium, to refine our policy development.

We will also expand the use of technology to improve quality and consistency. A few years ago, we implemented the electronic Claims Analysis Tool (eCAT) which assists disability examiners in documenting initial decisions to ensure compliance with agency policy. We plan to expand eCAT to process CDRs. Based on the success of eCAT, we used a similar approach to build a tool we can use at the appeals level. We will eventually extend eCAT to our field offices, resulting in our agency having one tool to assist in ensuring proper documentation and compliance with agency policy throughout the entire disability process.

Expanding the use of video hearings – one of our key initiatives – will help increase efficiency and improve customer service. Specifically, it will enable us to balance workloads across the country, reduce the need for (and the costs of) our ALJs and other hearing office staff to travel between offices and to remote sites to hold hearings, and reduce the need for claimants to travel long distances to hearing offices. We also are working to expand video hearing participation more broadly to allow more attorneys and non-attorney representatives to install and use their own video equipment to attend hearings from their own offices.

Strategies:

Expand use of MI to identify training needs and areas for improvement;
Broaden use of case analysis tools;
Expand use of predictive modeling;
Simplify policies;
Collaborate with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to collect updated occupational information; and
Formalize our pre-decisional quality review processes to increase national uniformity.

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FY 14-15 Priority Goal: Expand the use of video hearings. We will deliver a world-class customer experience by expanding the use of video technology to hold hearings.

Statement:

Increase video hearings. By September 30, 2015, increase the percentage of hearings we hold by video from 26 percent in FY 2013 to 30 percent.

Description:

Social Security pays disability benefits to people who cannot work because they have a medical condition expected to last at least one year or result in death. When we receive a claim for disability benefits, we consider all the information concerning a case before we make an eligibility decision. When we make a decision, we send a letter explaining our decision. If you do not agree with our decision, you can appeal, asking us to look at your case again. The reconsideration is the first level of our appeals process and involves a complete review of the claim by someone who did not take part in the original decision. If you disagree with the reconsideration decision, you may ask for a hearing. An Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) who had no part in the original decision or the reconsideration of the case conducts a hearing. Though the vast majority of hearings held are disability related, ALJs also hold hearings for non-disability related issues such as retirement.

We hold hearings either in-person at one of our 169 hearings offices or by using video teleconferencing equipment at many more locations. Those locations include:

Other hearing offices;
Permanent remote sites, which are leased spaces, usually in government buildings, in parts of the country some distance from hearing offices with large geographical service areas;
Claimant-only video sites, which are typically located in Social Security field offices some distance from hearing offices with large geographical service areas;and
Our National Hearing Centers (NHC), which are special hearing offices located around the country where we hold only video hearings.

As part of our Representative Video Project, claimants may also attend a hearing at their representative’s office if that representative owns and uses video equipment approved by Social Security.

A video hearing allows hearing participants to see and hear each other through large color television screens or desktop video units. The ALJ remains in the hearing office. The ALJ can see and speak with all hearing participants and vice versa through Social Security’s secure network. As with in-person hearings, we only record audio at video hearings.

The greatest benefit of video is that it allows us to assist offices that have more work than they can complete. Being able to move work from an office that has a significant backlog to one that does not helps us provide effective service to all claimants. The economic downturn did not affect all of our hearing offices equally. Due to regional differences in the economy, some hearing offices saw their workloads soar while others did not. Rather than only build new offices in our hardest-hit areas, and hiring and moving staff at great expense, Social Security’s response was to leverage our developing video hearing technology. Because of video, we can electronically move the work to an ALJ ready to hear and decide the case.

Though we had been using video on a very limited basis since FY 2005, our breakthrough came with the introduction of the NHCs, which hold only video hearings and can therefore provide relief to any hearing office throughout the country. Beginning in FY 2008, we began opening this new kind of office.

We also accelerated the placement of video units in hearing offices. Between FY 2008 and FY 2013, we placed 1,032 video units in the hearing operation, with more than 960 of those going to traditional hearing offices. This aggressive expansion allowed hearing offices to provide assistance to one another and to hold hearings in far-flung permanent remote sites within a hearing office’s own service area. In this way, offices in California and Florida can assist offices in the Midwest and vice-versa, depending on the changing needs of our offices. In FY 2013, traditional hearing offices held approximately 23 percent of all hearings by video.

We have incrementally increased the percentage of hearings we hold by video from 20 percent in FY 2010 and FY 2011, to 23 percent in FY 2012 and now to 26 percent (179,308 hearings) in FY 2013. Much of this growth came from increasing our video footprint, achieved by equipping more and more of our hearing offices and remote hearing sites with video equipment each successive year. We are aiming to hold 28 percent of hearings by video in FY 2014 and 30 percent in FY 2015.

Though we are nearing the saturation point for video equipment placement, we believe further video hearing expansion is possible, and that we can still greatly improve customer service. We can hold more video hearings by improving the quality, marketing, and deployment of video units and by publishing a final regulation that puts time limits on a claimant’s right to decline a video hearing.

Further expansion of video hearings positions Social Security for maximum flexibility in responding to changing customer needs. Video lets us electronically move work rather than build “brick and mortar” offices whose useful lifespan may be limited.

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Maximize Efficiencies throughout the Disability Program

Statement:No Data Available

Description:

We remain committed to providing the best service to the public by exploring new technologies and using modern tools to improve efficiencies throughout our disability program. We are improving the claims process, making it easier for the public to file disability applications and enabling us to process applications more efficiently.

When fully implemented, our State DDS and Federal disability case processing sites will use a common system (i.e., DCPS). DCPS will replace all the disparate applications currently in use at the State DDSs and Federal sites, many of which are rigid, outdated, and resource intensive. The new system will incorporate additional functionality, such as decision support tools, improved quality checks, improved MI, and compatibility with industry standards for electronic medical records.

Expanded use of health IT offers yet another opportunity to realize efficiencies in the disability process. Among other positive effects, health IT will enable us to quickly recognize if a treating healthcare provider is also one of our health IT partners. If a provider is a health IT partner, our systems communicate directly with the provider’s systems to request medical records, confirm the claimant or beneficiary has provided an authorization for release of information form, and return the provider’s records to us. Health IT has the potential to increase our efficiency and lower the claimant’s wait time for a decision by giving us medical evidence within minutes rather than days or weeks.

Strategies:

Enhance our ability to share workloads among our offices to maximize resources;
Increase process automation; and
Expand the use of health IT.

Learn More

Enhance Employment Support Programs and Create New Opportunities for Returning Beneficiaries to Work

Statement:No Data Available

Description:

Strategies:

Partner with the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services to implement Promoting Readiness of Minors on SSI;
Simplify work incentive policies and improve programs such as Ticket to Work and the Vocational Rehabilitation Cost Reimbursement program; and
Develop return-to-work demonstration proposals.

Learn More

Agency Priority Goals

FY 14-15: Expand the use of video hearings. We will deliver a world-class customer experience by expanding the use of video technology to hold hearings.

Statement:

Increase video hearings. By September 30, 2015, increase the percentage of hearings we hold by video from 26 percent in FY 2013 to 30 percent.

Description:

We hold hearings either in-person at one of our 169 hearings offices or by using video teleconferencing equipment at many more locations. Those locations include:

Other hearing offices;
Permanent remote sites, which are leased spaces, usually in government buildings, in parts of the country some distance from hearing offices with large geographical service areas;
Claimant-only video sites, which are typically located in Social Security field offices some distance from hearing offices with large geographical service areas;and
Our National Hearing Centers (NHC), which are special hearing offices located around the country where we hold only video hearings.

As part of our Representative Video Project, claimants may also attend a hearing at their representative’s office if that representative owns and uses video equipment approved by Social Security.

Learn More

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