The COVID-19 pandemic tested our nation’s public benefits system in unimaginable ways. With an unprecedented 60 million individuals turning to unemployment and social services to satisfy their basic needs, state and local governments were stretched to meet the demand.

But state and local government leaders have risen to the challenge of providing their constituents with critical services. They created and administered innovative solutions, complete with wholly original processes, and brought desperately needed employment, cash, food, and healthcare support to families in crisis. These public sector heroes raised the bar during this critical time and facilitated economic recovery for our local communities, making the impossible possible for its people. 

When state and local government agencies partner with Google Cloud, they can reimagine how they deliver human services and labor services for their communities. All in a matter of weeks, instead of months or years.

Tools that solve for remote work and service delivery hurdles

Never before was there such a need for modern and accessible tools to allow a workforce to secure new jobs and operate remotely. The Virtual Career Center (VCC), built on Google Cloud, was designed with these needs in mind.

Google Workspace, including Google Meet, allows job seekers to schedule video meetings with career coaches, job recruiters, and potential employers. The Google Job Search API will enable them to explore career opportunities best suited to their skills and interests.

A thousand miles away, the Rhode Island Virtual Career Center was helping its job seekers by offering virtual meetings with career coaches, the ability to schedule meetings with prospective employers, and help on building effective resumes. Skipper, the CareerCompass RI Bot, an intelligent agent for careers, uses data and machine learning to facilitate potential new career paths and reskilling opportunities for Rhode Islanders.

In addition to enabling remote work, Google Workspace can support remote service delivery, a critical need for those involved in health and human services programs. Engaging with individuals and families is an essential component for more of these programs, including eligibility determination, assessment, and service delivery. The ability to engage directly with the public through virtual interviews, counseling sessions, telehealth, etc. improves access for those on both sides of the screen. Further, through Google Classroom, a component of Google Workspace for Education, foster and adoptive parents can obtain virtual training required for licensing. 

Tools to expedite relief funds and employment assistance

As the number of people applying for unemployment assistance skyrocketed, so did the backlog of claims requiring review. The pandemic also saw a rise in fraudulent claims, which caused delays for families waiting on legitimate payments and resulted in unnecessary spending for government agencies. Realizing the magnitude of the challenge was beyond the agencies’ current resources, and they shifted their focus to machine learning.  

To address the massive backlog of claims, SpringML partnered with Google Cloud to develop the Improper Payment Analytics solution that successfully leverages AI to help agencies identify fraudulent claims and avoid improper payments so aid can be prioritized for those who need it. Though such a tool would typically take months to develop, the team was able to launch it in just weeks, to the benefit of all stakeholders involved. Families awaiting legitimate payments received checks more quickly, and state and local governments saved millions in spending.

For instance, to address erroneous payments totaling $330 million to fraudulent applicants, the State of Ohio partnered with Google Cloud to utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions to proactively identify and decline improper payment risks. As a result, the State avoided paying fraudulent claims and accelerated the payment of legitimate benefits to families facing financial hardship.

The New York State Department of Labor launched a streamlined unemployment application to allow residents to apply for pandemic unemployment assistance without the added burden of applying for unemployment insurance. Success was immediate, and the application backlog plummeted as New Yorkers got the financial aid they desperately needed. Illinois took a different approach, deploying Contact Center Artificial Intelligence (CCAI) to create virtual agents who assist with specialized calls 24/7, in multiple languages, providing turn-by-turn guidance in real-time. Conversations can be turned into insights through analytics and reporting tools that uncover key call drivers and customer sentiment. By solving for spikes in call volume, CCAI has helped process more than 1 million unemployment claims.

Automated data solutions bring immediate food and cash assistance resources

With millions out of work and out of school during the pandemic, food and cash assistance became a critical need. Applying for all of these benefits requires significant documentation that, in most cases, has historically been manually processed. Given the volume of people in need, this took a massive amount of human resources and time.

Using Document AI (DocAI), agencies can automate this highly manual process and speed up the delivery of critical benefits to individuals and families. DocAI extracts the key data, provides a confidence score in a single review pane for staff review, and automatically uploads that data to the case management system–significantly reducing manual processing. Today, these state and local government organizations turn to DocAI to eliminate the difficult paperwork application process to help meet the benefit needs of their residents now and tomorrow, as illustrated by both the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) and the State of Hawaii.

The Wisconsin DWD streamlined their paper unemployment insurance claims using DocAI by enabling DWD staff to receive critical data extracted from submitted applications and make decisions rapidly, saving time for both applicants and staff. The State of Hawaii also used DocAI to extract, interpret, and transport COVID-19 test result data of incoming travelers to Google Cloud instantly. As a result, Hawaii was able to welcome travelers and reopen its economy in the midst of the pandemic.

Partner with us

After making it through this very difficult period, agencies have emerged from the pandemic with stronger labor and health and human service delivery for their residents. State and local governments recognized the necessity of virtual engagement and expanded access to services to meet this critical moment, solving for work, cash, food and healthcare needs.

To learn more about Google Cloud for human services and labor, watch our video on the power of customer innovation or contact your Google Cloud sales representative. Let’s get solving together.

Hackensack Meridian Health (HMH) executive Mark Eimer explains how an ambitiously-timed rollout of a comprehensive suite of Google products helped the entire organization—from doctors to IT staff—achieve better security, cultivate a more equitable work environment, and ultimately, improve patient outcomes.

How does a recently merged, 17-hospital healthcare system fast-track a platform migration and hardware rollout securely and in a way that improves work for everyone, regardless of location or role? These are the questions that kept me up at night in early 2020, when the pandemic demanded a “big bang”—something our legacy laptops and operating systems couldn’t handle.

We began our work with Google in 2020 with the adoption of Chrome as our default browser. As we migrated platforms, keeping patient data safe was of the utmost importance to us, along with providing every staff member with the tools they needed to work virtually. Our staff often experienced issues accessing our web-based applications using Internet Explorer or Edge Browser, a problem that went away when we switched to Chrome. Chrome’s versatile compatibility also made it easier for my team to migrate all of our web-based operations, and Chrome’s security and manageability were key components to making this switch a huge win for the organization.

The success of this migration led us to extend our Google partnership to patient care applications—where Google’s expertise in AI and ML helps scale the use of diagnostics tools and improve other aspects of the patient journey.

Achieving security at every step 

Like so many other healthcare organizations, we’ve been concerned about ransomware attacks. This is part of why we moved to Google Workspace and distributed over 3,000 Chrome OS devices in kiosk mode in March of 2020, when many of us went remote due to the pandemic. We were very concerned about team members accessing corporate applications through home devices that were running EOL operating systems (WIN7), as well as a general lack of antivirus and encryption measures.

We were protected by the fact that Google’s software and hardware both had built-in security features that we needed to stave off sophisticated attackers. For example, Chrome OS automatically updates to the latest security update and encrypts data living outside the cloud on the hardware. These features protected us from security-related disruptions, letting us securely move a huge library of file shares and emails across thousands of accounts to Google Chrome OS in just four months.

A year later, in March 2021, we migrated the enterprise over to Google Workspace and saw an immediate reduction in spam by 30% from the inherent built-in AI/ML. This meant staff were less likely to receive (and click through) phishing attempts. My team could connect, create, and collaborate easily and securely—even as more of us were working from home and needed to access sensitive data remotely. 

Leveling the playing field

As an organization, we were surprised by how many team members didn’t have personal computers at home. We quickly decided that if we needed team members to work from home, the health network would have to supply hardware. Chromebooks’ lower price tag compared to PCs—on top of their built-in security controls—allowed us to purchase, deploy, and support that initial distribution of 3,000 Chromebooks to team members in less than three weeks, providing devices to every eligible remote employee instead of just a select few. This was vital to reaching our equitable technology goal as part of our diversity and inclusion initiative: everybody has the same tools to do good work.

When all employees have what they need to do their jobs well, we get better patient outcomes. Before we began this cloud adoption journey, patient and staff experiences were different within the hospitals and outside of them. 

Now it’s the same wherever our staff is, and we’ve seen efficiency and accessibility benefits extend to the patient side. For example, we built a web-based contact center that supports 80 locations that use Workspace and Chrome OS devices. Since customer service, admin, and providers are all on the same system, it has become a one-stop shop for patients.

Furthermore, through the Grow with Google program, we were able to provide another benefit to employees that drove our equity goals. Google trained 50 non-IT staff members—from environmental services, food and nutrition, and other non-tech areas who were interested in making a career change to IT—on the Google products we were using. They may not have thought about switching to a career in IT before the Grow with Google program came to our organization, but through this partnership, they now have that opportunity.

A strategic, long-term partner

With any large-scale rollout, the work doesn’t end once laptops are in employee hands. Google has shown their commitment to long-term collaboration as they continuously optimize their products for the unique needs of healthcare providers and go the extra mile in tailoring tools to our staff’s workflows. 

For example, on the Chrome OS side, the Google team has helped our registration desks and document centers with device integration for hardware like credit card readers and e-signature pads. They’ve also helped us meet security and privacy requirements mandated by state and federal governments around HIPAA, Medicaid, and Medicare reimbursements. Over this next year, we’ll look at a feature roadmap with Google Cloud to deliver further enhancements, iterating on the product itself to meet our needs for the present and the future.

Delivering the future of healthcare

The benefits we’ve seen around security and usability—and the ability to provide all staff with equal access to Google’s technology—are why we’re expanding our partnership with Google to both the administrative and clinical sides of HMH. In addition to further Google rollouts with corporate, next year we’re distributing Chromebooks to all 350 of our ambulatory clinics.

We’re also working with the Google professional services team to create a custom AI model that analyzes 3D mammogram images. This AI model will enable two providers to read mammograms—which adheres to international best practices but is currently rare in the US—without requiring additional time. Conducting double readings of mammograms will yield better health outcomes for our patients, such as a lower patient recall rate and an increased accuracy in detecting breast cancer.

We’re currently building the model using a variety of Google Cloud products, including Cloud Healthcare API. Once complete, this model is expected to be trained, deployed, and maintained in Google’s Vertex AI, allowing our providers to be more productive as they make clinical decisions with AI support. As the model is proven over time, we plan to make the predictive services accessible to other healthcare organizations.

With Google, we’re able to achieve a unified architecture for storing data as well as training and deploying AI models, which enable our staff to work more efficiently and securely from anywhere. While I may not be able to predict the future as accurately as AI can, I foresee our continued partnership with Google as a key part of HMH’s improved provider and patient outcomes.

This week, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is launching the first preview of its new Rubin Science Platform (RSP) for an initial cohort of astronomers. The observatory, which is located in Chile but managed by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab in Tucson, AZ and SLAC in California, is jointly funded by the NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy. The platform provides an easy-to-use interface to store and analyze the massive datasets of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will survey a third of the sky each night for ten years, detecting billions of stars and galaxies, and millions of supernovae, variable stars, and small bodies in our Solar System.

The LSST datasets are unprecedented in size and complexity, and will be far too large for scientists to download to their personal computers for analysis. Instead, scientists will use the RSP to process, query, visualize, and analyze the LSST data archives through a mixture of web portal, notebook, and other virtual data analysis services. An initial launch with simulated data, called Data Preview 0, builds on the Rubin Observatory’s three-year partnership with Google to develop an Interim Data Facility (IDF) on Google Cloud to prototype hosting of the massive LSST dataset. This agreement marks the first time a cloud-based data facility has been used for an astronomy application of this magnitude.

Bringing the stars to the cloud

For Data Preview 0, the IDF leverages Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Compute Engine to provide the Rubin Observatory user community access to simulated LSST data in an early version of the RSP. The simulated data were developed over several years by the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration to imitate five years of an LSST-like survey over 300 square degrees of the sky (about 1,500 times the area of the moon). The resulting images are very realistic: they have the same instrumental characteristics, such as pixel size and sensitivity to photons, that are expected from the Rubin Observatory’s LSST Camera, and they were processed with an early version of the LSST Science Pipelines that will eventually be used to process LSST data. “This will be the first time that these workloads have ever been hosted in a cloud environment. Researchers will have an opportunity to explore an early version of this platform,” says Ranpal Gill, senior manager and head of communications at the Rubin Observatory.

Broadening access for more researchers

Over 200 scientists and students with Rubin Observatory data rights were selected to participate in Data Preview 0 from a pool of applicants that represents a wide range of demographic criteria, regions, and experience level. Participants will be supported with resources such as tutorials, seminars, communication channels, and networking opportunities—and they will be free to pursue their own science at their own pace using the data in the RSP. 

“The revolutionary nature of the future LSST dataset requires a commensurately innovative system for data access and analysis paired with robust support for scientists,” says Melissa Graham, lead community scientist for the Rubin Observatory and research scientist in the astronomy department at the University of Washington. “I’m personally excited to enhance my own skills by using the RSP’s tools for big data analysis, while also helping others to learn and to pursue their LSST-related science goals during Data Preview 0.” 

At the same time, the fact that the RSP is hosted in the cloud provides researchers at smaller institutions access to state-of-the-art astronomy infrastructure that is comparable to that of the largest national research centers.

The launch benefits the observatory too: the development team can learn what researchers are interested in while also testing and debugging the platform. Graham says that “the platform is still in active development so researchers using it will be able to follow along in the progress, and provide feedback on ways that we can optimize the development of the tools.”

Next steps

The LSST aims to begin the ten-year survey in 2023-24 and expects it to include 500 petabytes of data. Through the cloud, Google aims to help make this extraordinary project scalable and accessible to researchers everywhere. To learn more about Data Preview 0, watch this video.

Want to ramp up your own research in the cloud? We offer research credits to academics using Google Cloud for qualifying projects in eligible countries. You can find our application form on Google Cloud’s website or contact our sales team.