Business Case
Any changes affecting benefit amounts, food conversions, and food substitutions can mean extensive modifications to a WIC MIS, redemption processing, and ultimately clinic flows and timing.
When the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) published the “2019 Food Package Recommendations,” detailing how WIC can improve nutritional outcomes for participants, WIC agencies realized they needed to evaluate, in detail, all the program policies impacted by FNS guidance, to fully comply with these new directives.
The Solution
CMA offers a comprehensive WIC system, HANDS, that is fully prepared to meet these kinds of challenges, without disruption to current WIC service levels.
HANDS eWIC solution offers the best food package functionality on the market today. HANDS is extremely beneficial in the areas of Standard Food Packages; where agency policy is defined, and the Tailoring Workspace; where customization and alternative packages are built at the clinic.
Standard Food Packages provide the flexibility for agencies to define policy for each category and age range. These policies will reflect respective strategies for cost containment, while meeting participant needs and local product availability. Within HANDS, these general packages are made available for quick and easy selection at the local agency. For each category/age, a default food package can be identified to provide the most common combination of foods, fast tracking the assignment process to the clinic.
Once food packages are activated, a nutritionist has the power to quickly locate, tailor, and issue food packages with the assurance of automated equivalencies for substitutions, clickable selections, and real-time preview mode. The Tailoring Workspace exposes options for food item replacement and food substitutions that can be reviewed with the participant. All available options lead to a customized, compliant food package.
Nutritionists can also opt not to tailor and go straight to issuance, which decreases wait and processing times in a busy clinic environment. These time savings lead to more time for nutrition counseling, risk evaluation, and client-focused operations.
The Results
Using HANDS, the client easily adapted to program changes concerning Food Packages. Benefits include: Delivering thoughtful policy to clinics; Issuing customized, compliant food packages; Quickly locating, tailoring, and issuing food packages; Rapidly adjusting to marketplace package/size modifications by manufacturers; Improving response times and consistency; Minimizing data entry time and errors; and Facilitating proper formula assignment.