Effective Citizen Services with Cardinality’s low-code EmpowerPlatform

By Kevin Jones

Sep 01, 2022

We are at the genesis of major transformation for health and human services programs. Government agencies responded quickly and effectively to standing up operations to support a world stricken by an unexpected public health crisis. Our operations, our workforce, and our citizens have realized that we can and should do things differently. Government agencies are demanding the ability to control the rules of engagement, to command better outcomes for the most vulnerable populations they serve. The paradigm of transactional services has come to an end, and the new beginning of the whole person services has begun.

Many factors must be taken into account to serve differently including culture and operational change, but technology enablement is the backbone. To serve differently means siloed systems, complicated modernization efforts and inadequate data sharing across multiple agencies need to be solved.

How can a citizen receive the personalized services when the frontline caseworkers have limited insights into the whole person needs and how can a citizen understand all the services available to them if they have to go through different channels?

The government has to serve differently, because our citizens deserve the best outcomes we can provide. Cardinality’s EmpowerPlatform is a purpose-built low-code platform that will facilitate the best outcomes:

• Sharing data, information & technology across multiple agencies to deliver consistent and enhanced citizen experience
• Delivery of personalized citizen services, guiding them to positive outcomes using AI
• Agencies to achieve modernization of legacy systems faster via modular capabilities

It enables a people, process, and technology alignment that enables government agencies to achieve such goals.

Responsible use of data by tackling risk, consent, privacy & security is a core area of expertise for our leadership team. This article , co-authored by our CEO Thiag Loganathan, describes a proven framework for data sharing across government organizations. This form of approach protects the integrity of decision processes and the privacy of citizens, while maximizing the “full picture” of program inter-relationships.

EmpowerPlatform extends and unifies existing legacy systems, delivering immediate benefits to organizations without a lengthy implementation timeline. And to support these programs, instead of spending years implementing an all-new ERP system, Cardinality low-code platform helps rapidly develop solutions that are built for unique organizational needs and take just weeks to implement. Unifying and extending existing solutions also helps ease a pain point faced by state and local governments: data silos.

The core architecture of the EmpowerPlatform is designed to comply with Data Privacy, Protection & Security compliance required by federal & state agencies. With a combination of infrastructure & application level controls in place, the Cardinality platform conforms to HIPAA, GDPR & NIST standards. This is reinforced by Cardinality earning status as Advanced Technology Partner for AWS and receiving AWS Qualified Software designation … distinctions aligned with high commercial-grade status for AWS-hosted workloads.

To enable government agencies to accelerate modernization & help realize positive outcomes faster, we have partnered with NTT Data to offer Cardinality EmpowerPlatform as an offering, having addressed the common, foundational cloud infrastructure, security and technology challenges as part of the platform.

Cardinality EmpowerPlatform is modeled based on MD THINK (Maryland Total Human-services Integrated Network), which is a secure, AWS cloud-based technology system that allows multiple state agencies to share data and common services as one platform.

Cardinality technology was utilized to accelerate modernization of Child, Juvenile and Adult Protective systems (CJAMS) and broadly by MD THINK to build a modern, intuitive & mobile-friendly case management system. It presented a transition from a program-centric to client-centric approach to case intake and management, as well as eligibility determination and analytics.

It is currently used by approximately 5,000 caseworkers across the state, and supports more than 6 million Maryland residents. CJAMS has equipped Child Welfare caseworkers to become more effective and improve outcomes for the vulnerable children.

As author and motivational speaker, Jim Rohn, said “Your life doesn’t get better by chance, it gets better by change”. Serving differently requires change and we all know change is hard but to improve lives and to improve outcomes we must cultivate change in order to continuously improve and serve differently.