CAI Neurodiverse Solutions helps support your commitment to diversity at the workplace
Challenge
Highmark Health, one of the largest integrated health care delivery and financing systems in the U.S., is known for its commitment to diversity, innovation, and collaboration. In fact, the Disability Equality Index has named the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based company a “Best Place to Work” for individuals with disabilities since the benchmark’s launch in 2014. When the organization’s IT company, HM Health Solutions, discovered a need for expanded capabilities, it decided to grow its full-time employment opportunities to include neurodivergent individuals – but wanted to ensure success right out of the gate.
Solution
The company turned to CAI Neurodiverse Solutions to deploy a team of neurodivergent individuals in support of its greater diversity efforts. It knew CAI would help establish the right processes for recruiting, training, and integrating neurodivergent individuals into the workplace.
CAI worked closely with the company to identify the areas that would benefit from the project – in this case, quality assurance, access control, and mainframe development – and began hand-picking employees to build the respective teams. Each team is led by a team lead certified to work with neurodivergent individuals. The Quality Assurance team got to work immediately on release management, automated testing, scripting, and documentation. The Access Management team quickly got up to speed in the needed security access and risk management work. CAI also deployed a third team of mainframe developers.
65 – 70%
of all requests are completed by the CAI Neurodiverse Solutions teams.
4 times
the number of requests required are completed per week.
Results
The CAI recruiting process is designed to match qualified candidates for specific roles, preparing employees for long-term success – not short-term employment. The preparation paid off quickly for HM Health Solutions.
The team members had the ongoing workplace support they needed to leverage their strengths – including attention to detail, a preference for repetitive work, a high level of concentration, and superior problem-solving and pattern recognition abilities – and the increase in productivity was evidence. The new teams quickly exceeded expectations in both quantity and quality of work, proving they could handle multiple types of requests without error and ahead of service-level agreement (SLA) timeframes.
"The CAI Neurodiverse Solutions teams took our goals and blew them away. We can eliminate some of our statements of work. We can eliminate costs."
The Access Management team today completes four times the number of security requests per week it is asked to complete, delivering 65 – 70 percent of all requests even though it makes up just 40 percent of the larger team. The Quality Assurance team is programming in Java and working on leading-edge technology for testing automation, incorporating searches, data input, and web page reliability into a complex web-based system for the company. Team members work closely with HM Health Solutions colleagues and participate in social activities, team meetings, and team-building activities. And they continue to accomplish increasingly demanding work.
