Disability process redesign: the proposal from the SSA Disability Process Reengineering Team

About a year ago, the Social Security Administration (SSA) began the Disability Process Reengineering Program. This agency-wide project is one way SSA is seeking to improve its overall service to its customers while enriching and improving the worklives of its employees. The Disability Process Reengineering Team's objective is to fundamentally rethink and redesign SSA's disability programs under OASDI and SSI to achieve dramatic improvements in critical measures of performance. The Team asked, "If SSA had the opportunity today to design the processes, what would they look like?" The Disability Reengineering Team's proposal to SSA for reengineering the disability process was announced in the Federal Register (April 15, 1994, pp. 18188-18264). This is not the final proposal; comments from the public were solicited in the announcement. This note gives a brief description of the new process proposed by the Team as well as a summary of the current process.