ARBenefits

Until recently, every time an Arkansas state employee had to change their benefit selections, they had to download a change form as a PDF, fill it out, and submit it to Arkansas' Employee Benefits Division. In many cases they would print out the PDF form and mail it in. A single employee then typed that information into the ARBenefits system by hand and created tickets for the administrators to make the necessary changes.

Now that system has changed completely. The new ARBenefits system allows employees to submit enrollment changes directly in the system. That means each year when the open enrollment period begins, all 57,300 government employees can easily log in and make their selections without any arduous process.

If employees still want to send in a physical form, that's fine too. Employees, administrators, or even representatives of multiple employees, can easily submit their physical forms in the system and our OCR (optical character recognition) system will read those forms and format the data correctly, pointing out any errors.

When employees need to make changes to their benefits outside the open enrollment period, we call those "qualifying events." Now, every eligible qualifying event can be addressed directly in the system, with programmatic rules dictating what can and can't be changed for each qualifying event.

This case study has only scratched the surface of the improvements made to the system, and we know that users and administrators may be unaware of all the changes to the completely revamped processes. To that end, we created comprehensive training materials including user guides and training videos, and provided on-site training at the Employee Benefits Division office in Little Rock.