Eligibility

The Eligibility Module of ServicePoint from Bowman Systems is an easy-to-use system for matching clients who need social services with organizations capable of meeting their needs. This powerful web-based software is targeted primarily to the homeless sector and gives social service organizations a broad view of the services that are available for their clients. The system is flexible and can be used to quickly find and generate reports of the services available for one or all members of a household simultaneously.

Establishing the Poverty Base

One of the first things necessary to work with the Eligibility Module of ServicePoint is to set the Poverty Base used by the system. The Poverty Base is an amount of income (in dollars) at or below which an individual is officially considered “in poverty.” The Poverty Base is a global setting that will affect the rest of the Eligibility calculations made by ServicePoint. This is a very important step because almost all social service agencies base their eligibility requirements on the clients being at the poverty level (or some percentage of the poverty level). Depending on the organizations that you will be working with and the state that you are in, you may need to set the poverty level based on the federal guidelines or your state’s guidelines.

Adding a Taxonomy to a Provider

The second step in establishing eligibility requirements is to set up the taxonomies for your providers in the ServicePoint system. The term “taxonomy” refers to the AIRS (Alliance of Information Referral Services) taxonomy classification system. The AIRS classification system is designed to help standardize the definitions of different types of providers of social services with the goal of making it easier to find and provide services to clients.

Editing Eligibility Preferences for an Individual Provider

The guidelines for the individual providers may vary from the guidelines established by the federal government or your state government. For an individual program, the requirement may be that the client must be at a particular percent of the poverty level (90%, 100%, 120%, etc.), which may be more or less than the global guideline. Another consideration is that some providers count various things as income that other providers may not. For example, some may count alimony and others may not; some may count Medicaid as income and others may not. Some providers may also count income based on the last 30 days and others may count 90 days. You select what counts as income and what does not. You also select which members of the household count toward eligibility for services. (Note: The eligibility criteria for a provider can be added to or modified at any time.)

Matching Clients with Appropriate Service Providers

After the setup of the requirements for the Bowman Systems ServicePoint Eligibility Module is complete, it is a simple process to find services to meet specific client needs. It is simply a matter of identifying the need, selecting the household members this need pertains to, and clicking on the appropriate button to display the results. The results screen shows you a complete list of Providers capable of meeting the needs for each household member that you selected. In turn, clicking on the name of the desired Provider will take you to specific Provider information through the ResourcePoint interface.

Establish the Poverty Base.

Edit Eligibility preferences for each provider.

Choose Eligibility options.

Edit Eligibility preferences for each service.

Choose Eligibility options.

Eligibility requirement will appear in client assessments.

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