DCF blocked more than 700,000 calls in April from people who wanted to speak to a real person

Bryan Simpson Unites States Courthouse in Jacksonville, Florida. (Photo by Jackie Llanos/Florida Phoenix)

JACKSONVILLE — The Florida Department of Children and Families blocked 54% of phone calls from people wanting to reach one of its call center agents in April, according to data presented in federal court Wednesday.

The agency, which handles calls related to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, lacks standards governing the number of blocked calls or hangups by clients because they can’t remain on hold, the call center’s director Nichole Solomon testified on Wednesday.

DCF hung up on 744,000 people waiting on hold before they could talk to employees in April alone because the call center lacks capacity to manage all the calls it gets, said Solomon, who has been in charge of the call center since early 2023. Instead, those 744,000 callers who opted to speak to a person instead of the automated system, heard a message saying all agents were busy and to call later.

“The primary priority is to get as many people hired as quickly as possible,” Solomon said about the agency’s efforts to fill almost 200 roles in the center, which receives as many as 2.2 million calls each month.

FL social services call center has 2nd longest wait times in the country; $12 million might help

Who answers the calls?

While the department must report the average wait time and the rate of abandoned calls to the federal government, it doesn’t report blocked calls. During April, people waited 19 minutes on average to speak with an agent and nearly 30% of calls were abandoned, according to data DCF submitted to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Earlier this year, Florida had the second-longest call wait times in the country.

Solomon and other DCF officials took the stand Wednesday in the federal class action filed by Medicaid patients alleging Florida violated their constitutional right to due process when it took away their health care coverage without proper notice. The call center has been a key aspect of the trial because plaintiffs argue agents gave them wrong information about their Medicaid eligibility.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys played several calls between their clients and DCF during testimony on Monday and Tuesday.

“I’m not going to sit on the phone and go through every single thing … that’s not my job,” a call center agent told a mother calling about her child’s loss of benefits during one of the calls played in court.

The state was just starting to review Medicaid eligibility for millions of people following the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency when Solomon began leading the call center.

But when Floridians called DCF after getting notices about the status of their coverage, it wasn’t always a DCF employee answering the call.

In fact, the automated voice response system routed those calls to a third-party vendor called Lighthouse, which provided only general information. Lighthouse employees put callers requesting more specific information back on hold to transfer them to DCF call center employees.

Millions going into call center staffing

During her testimony, Solomon spoke about changes DCF put in place at the beginning of the year, such as providing newer call center agents with a live chat through which they could ask more knowledgeable agents questions a caller might have, she said. Additionally, the agency wants to hire 700 call center agents this year; 521 are working now, Solomon said.

New hires don’t get trained to handle Medicaid calls as part of their initial onboarding, the call center director said. The initial training focuses on conducting interviews for other government assistance programs.

“So, you waited until the unwinding period was over to enhance the staff and the training of your staff?” Florida Health Justice attorney Lynn Hearn asked Solomon, referring to the post-COVID emergency purge of clients. She replied that the agency also hired staff last year. Hearn and attorneys from the National Health Law Program represent the plaintiffs.

Florida lawmakers gave the agency more than $12 million this year to improve staffing at the call center.

Jared Nordlund of UnidosUS, a Latinx civil rights organization that lobbied lawmakers to invest in the call center, said the testimony suggests the Legislature needs to pay more attention to DCF.

“I don’t think that [lawmakers] would want to have their constituents blocked trying to get help from the government,” Nordlund said in a phone interview with Florida Phoenix. He is the UnidosUs Florida policy director.

He continued: “We need greater transparency and greater oversight. There’s no reason that this thing is as bad as it is because nobody’s holding anybody accountable at all. And so, we got to put pressure on the Legislature to actually oversee DCF and what’s going on with it.”

The group’s Florida team made two reports illustrating longer wait times and higher abandonment rates than in data DCF submitted to the federal government earlier this year. He said the UnidosUS employees who made calls to DCF heard the message that all agents were busy at all times of the day during their research. Now, based on trial testimony, he said he knows DCF intentionally blocked those calls.

UnidosUS is getting ready to start making calls to DCF for another report in August.

If U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard sides with the plaintiffs, all the people the state kicked off Medicaid without proper notice could have their coverage restored.