Establishing the Poverty Base

The first requirement to use the Eligibility Module of ServicePoint is to set the Poverty Base of 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.

Indexing an Agency’s Services

The second step in establishing eligibility requirements is to establish what services are provided by the Agencies listed in the ServicePoint system. ServicePoint uses the AIRS (Alliance of Information Referral Services) Taxonomy to define available services. The AIRS Taxonomy is designed to help standardize the definitions of services provided by social service agencies in order to easily find appropriate service providers.

Editing Eligibility Preferences for an Individual Provider

The guidelines for the individual agencies 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 every agency has a differing perspective about the financial items that count as income. For example, some may count alimony and others may not; some may count Medicaid as income and others may not. Some agencies may also count income based on the last 30 days and others may count 90 days. ServicePoint Eligibility allows you to 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 an agency can be added to or modified at any time.)

Matching Clients with Appropriate Service Providers

After setting up the requirements for the Bowman Systems ServicePoint Eligibility Module there is an easy-to-understand process to find services to match specific client needs. Simply identify the need, selecting the household members the need pertains to, and click on the appropriate button to display the results. The results screen shows you a complete list of agencies capable of meeting the needs for each selected household member. In turn, clicking on the name of the desired agency will allow you to issue a referral to that agency.