The Right Direction

There's good news to share. We're making a rare late year leap in our Food Stamp Program payment accuracy rate. Toward the end of our sample year there's so many completed cases in our quality control sample that the rate doesn't vary too much, but we had great July results. Now with two months for the QA staff to finish up we're at 93.6%, and there's a chance we can reach our 2005 campaign target goal of 94% accuracy.

Capital City Weekly: Food stamp program helps stretch dollars

by Sonja Koukel
Capitol City Weekly

As the recently hired Food Stamp Nutrition educator, Helen Idzorek works with individuals, families and community organizations to offer programs designed to assist food stamp recipients in stretching their food dollars and enjoying healthy, nutritious meals. Helen's goal is to provide educational programs that increase, within a limited budget, the likelihood of all food stamp recipients being able to make healthy food choices.

DPA Transition to ITS Customer Services Support

Beginning October 17th 2005 DHSS Information Technology Services (ITS) Customer Services will assume responsibility for Information Systems customer support previously provided by DPA Network Services staff. ITS Customer Services has three Customer Services “Information Systems Help Desks" and technical teams in Anchorage, Juneau, and Fairbanks. There are local phone numbers for these locations and a toll-free number for all other outlying areas. We also have a centralized “Information Systems Help Desk" email. Customer Services technicians are available to respond to calls and emails Monday through Friday 7am to 5pm. The specific contact information is posted below.

Service Network Advisory

Please note that beginning 10/07/2005 and ending 10/19/2005, you may experience noise or service interruptions because AT&T Alascom satellite facilities will be experiencing sun related service degradations as a result of the alignment of the sun with Alaska telecommunications satellite and ground stations. Sun outages occur for a few days semi-annually when the satellite passes directly between the antenna on earth and the sun. Radio frequency noise from the sun is stronger than the desired signal from the satellite, resulting in a brief service interruption.

I Think I Can, I Think I Can . . .

The QA results are nearly complete for May. We did make further progress toward our Food Stamp Program goal of 94% payment accuracy. The accuracy rate is now at 93.2%. Our statistician tells me that if we finish as strongly as we did during the final months last year, we can still reach our goal. Your daily attention to the many details that assure our ongoing work quality is appreciated. Good as we've done, there's still a way to go to for us to better the national payment accuracy average of 95.5%.