Case Study - Access NYC

With more than 8 million residents, New York City has an extremely large job to do in providing health and human services (HHS) benefits. Along with the difficulties of serving an immensely diverse population, the city has struggled with the internal roadblocks inherent in government.

Much of that has changed with the creation of ACCESS NYC, the city’s central HHS Web portal for citizen self-service. The portal went live in fall 2006 and has proven popular with New Yorkers. It allows city residents to easily check their eligibility for 35 city, state and federal human service benefit programs. It also lets citizens create an account, apply for programs and manage their own cases online. And ACCESS NYC is designed to reach New York’s diverse population by providing information in seven languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Haitian Creole.

“It’s really transforming the culture of how we interact with clients,” Bherwani said. “And once we link the data together, we’ll all have a better idea of what policies are working, which aren’t working, and how to tweak certain things.”