Cloud-based technology will enhance collaboration, telework and visibility

DUBLIN, Ohio—April 6, 2021—Northwoods is announcing Traverse, cloud-based technology for economic assistance agencies. The next generation solution for economic assistance will be available starting in June 2021 to help agencies address their most pressing challenges:

• Enable client self-service and real-time collaboration with clients and community partners
• Support continued remote work and telework with secure, web-based technology that supports seamless intra-agency communication, handoffs and visibility
• Provide agency leaders visibility into operations and caseworker workload

"The need to modernize technology for economic assistance is immediate and critical," said Gary Heinze, president and CEO. “Traverse will help agencies protect the safety net for vulnerable families by giving caseworkers tools to truly collaborate with clients, community partners and each other. The technology will also afford workers time to find out a family’s story behind the need for assistance to provide holistic care to every individual who needs it.”

Technology has not kept pace with the needs of economic assistance agencies to provide holistic care when determining eligibility for economic assistance programs including Medicaid, SNAP, TANF and childcare. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing challenges when connecting with clients, enabling a path to self-sufficiency and supporting telework.

Many agencies plan to continue supporting hybrid or fully remote work once the public health emergency ends. To do this, agency leaders need technology that supports client self-service and digital communication alternatives to in-person visits.

Traverse for economic assistance will:

• Provide secure and reliable cloud-based access to case information and documents from anywhere, reducing storage and paper costs
• Allow caseworkers to shift between home and office work environments without losing productivity
• Enable clients to communicate, submit documents and fill out forms on their own time
• Allow supervisors to manage remote and distributed work
• Provide real-time and historical reporting on factors that give insight into worker productivity and quality

Child welfare and adult & aging agencies have been using Traverse since its inception in 2018. Northwoods is building on Traverse’s document management and cloud-based infrastructure to meet the specific needs of economic assistance. Northwoods’ additional solutions for economic assistance include Compass® Pilot and Compass® Appointments.

Traverse will also automate routine tasks and streamline application processing, giving caseworkers more time to connect with clients as individuals and move from focusing on transactions to clients’ stories.

“Currently, workers spend much of their time on data entry, retrieval and processing. Automating portions of this process and streamlining others frees up workers to focus on tasks that require a human’s attention to truly put the human back in human services,” said Heinze.

About Northwoods 
Northwoods develops customized, high-tech software solutions for adult & aging, child support, child welfare and economic assistance. We help state and county human services agencies do more with less and get the results they need. Nearly 45,000 caseworkers across the country use our solutions to manage, collect, view and share content and data more efficiently. As a result, agencies improve service delivery, maximize productivity, make informed decisions and achieve better outcomes. Northwoods is headquartered in Dublin, Ohio.