State website aims to streamline services

Governor Mitt Romney, looking to fulfill a campaign pledge to streamline government bureaucracy, unveiled a website yesterday that creates a one-stop-shopping portal for citizens seeking to tap into the state's fragmented and complex network of social and medical services programs.

Found at www.mass.gov/eohhs, the website screens applicants, steers them toward appropriate programs, and allows them to fill out a single application for a bevy of services. It will eventually replace the paper-based system that requires the poor, elderly, and disabled to fill out as many as a dozen applications in scattered offices to receive such services as food stamps, child care subsidies, or substance abuse treatment.

''We have to bring the same level of efficiency and care and concern for our customer, the citizen, the person in need, that exists in the private sector," Romney said at a press conference at Boston's St. Francis House, one of four organizations working with the administration to fine-tune the website.

The product of an $8 million, yearlong effort, the ''virtual gateway" will be available to more than 100 providers statewide by March, bringing Massachusetts up to speed with a handful of other states that have also spent millions of dollars in recent years to unify their application processes for social services.

Eventually, Romney said, the website should help providers locate the estimated 70,000 people who are eligible for the federally funded Medicaid program but who continue to rely on the state-funded free care pool.

Homeless outreach organizations and social service providers, who have complained for decades that the state's medical, psychiatric and financial aid programs are too difficult to access, praised the new website.

''I want to applaud the governor for not only recognizing the problem but for his commitment to the poor and homeless and his leadership in fixing the problem," said Karen LaFrazia, executive director of St. Francis House.

Democrats in the legislature and public employee union officials also approved of the new gateway. However, they said it will be extremely limited in its usefulness as long as the number of social workers and service providers remains depleted by budget cuts.

John Templeton, president of SEIU Local 509, said his union has been lobbying for the governor and the legislature to fill some 300 vacant social worker jobs created by attrition and early retirement.