State streamlines professional licensing

Serving professionals and businesses with an automated online system

Challenge

A division in a mid-Atlantic state oversees the regulation of licensing to professionals and business entities to ensure the protection of the public’s health, safety, and welfare. To this end, the division maintains a licensing database to provide the public with vital licensure information, notify licensees of renewal periods and continuing education requirements, and help other state and federal agencies accomplish their missions. The division also investigates complaints from the public and oversees all board/commission activities to ensure that testing, licensing, disciplinary proceedings, rule-making, and other regulatory activities comply with the state’s code and applicable rules and regulations.

In the span of a single year, the division oversees more than 85,000 active licenses, issuing, on average, more than 11,000 new licenses and 30,000 renewals. It also receives more than 900 complaints and conducts over 600 investigations each year.

The process of managing the professional licensure, including how it handled applications, complaints, investigations, inspections, and hearings, had been cumbersome, highly manual, and reliant on a paper-based system. The division needed to streamline it into an innovative, internet-based platform and provide the public with a simplified and automated professional licensing service.

Solution

The division looked to CAI to help build an online self-service platform that replaces the archaic manual professional licensure system and manages all professional service applications, complaints, investigations, inspections, and hearings in the state.

CAI provided project management, organizational change management, and technical support to the client to identify a vendor with a viable solution and negotiate and establish the vendor contract. The CAI team served as a trusted partner overseeing vendor activities and technical decision-making as an extension of the division, providing consultation in training, testing, project deliverables, communication, and technical support of legacy systems. CAI acted on behalf of the state in managing the project and its vendors.

Benefits

The new system is a comprehensive online solution that manages the application and complaint oversight of all professional licenses in the state. It also provides a place to verify professional licenses and file complaints. The system automates and simplifies the professional licensing and brings the state’s professional licensure process up to standards shared with other states.