Designing Service Systems for Client Success

 

Governments often struggle to connect clients with the services that can benefit them most, with agencies seeing misalignment between who they most want to serve and who actually gets served. Dropped handoffs, long waiting times, or mis-matched services cause clients to slip through the cracks and disengage. The figure below demonstrates key questions facing government agencies when diagnosing problems in social service referral systems:

referral systemsThe GPL helps government agencies tackle these questions in order to improve population-level outcomes. By prioritizing clients most in need of services, accelerating the time it takes to connect clients to services, and reducing the share of clients who never reach services at all, governments can better meet the needs of the populations they serve. For more detail on this approach, see our blog post: Six powerful questions every government ought to ask to diagnose problems in social service referral systems.

Read more in the examples below about how government agencies are solving referral challenges across a wide range of issue areas, including child welfare, behavioral health, and criminal justice.