According to FSSA Secretary Mitch Roob, an informal V-CAN network has always existed in service agencies and hospitals. “A lot of these people were doing this work before with no training. Now, they’re doing it with training.”

Hospitals, he said, are particularly invested in helping clients get Medicaid since the state welfare system is a “payer.”

Other agencies, though, do not see any benefit for the man-hours spent helping clients get enrolled.

Food banks, he said, are currently suffering due to a lagging economy and limited donations.

“I think we need to think about how to specifically help food banks. They’re the one provider group in this which have really gotten under a lot of stress. It’s much more difficult for food banks today than two years ago.”

Despite devoting hours to helping people enroll in welfare programs, food banks and libraries, he said, do not see a direct benefit and compensation is not provided by the state.

“The guys who get nothing out of being V-CAN, other than the fact that they view it as their general mission, are libraries. The food banks are largely the same because they’re helping people sign up for food stamps but when they sign up for food stamps, they don’t get any of the money.”

While most caseworkers have been taken out of the picture, Main said, clients can still find caseworkers in each county office willing to help clients navigate the system. The system does not rely on the work done by those in the V-CAN system.

With more than 400 access points available to clients across the state, Main said the state has increased the places where clients can get services by 500 percent.

Wednesday, Bond said that being part of the V-CAN network at the start of the rollout was no small feat. “At the beginning, (it was) absolute chaos.”

Bond found that documents were lost in the new system and has since started writing clients’ Social Security numbers on each form to ensure documents end up in the right place. “Here lately, I haven’t really had a problem with them recently because I put the numbers on the bottom, I think.”

V-CAN training at Ivy Tech on Wednesday was a welcome gesture by the state, she said. “I got a lot of good knowledge from today.”

Main acknowledged that FSSA has had to make continuous improvements to the system since its launch.

While Main said that “documents are not getting lost,” state workers may have been taking too long to get the documents entered into the computer system set up to process applications. “Were we taking too long to attach those? Probably.”

Now, he said, state workers are filing application data within three business days.