Tuesday, September 8, 2009

WIC EBT

The proliferation of EBT in farmers markets across the country has been nothing short of amazing. Late last month a market in Newark, NJ became the latest location to be "EBT enabled."

For SNAP shoppers as well as Garden State farmers the North Ward Center market will be a blessing. Unfortunately WIC shoppers and those same farmers continue to be vexed by paper. For those of us in the EBT community, it is frustrating to watch that, knowing that the technology exists today to change that WIC shopping experience in to something faster, more convenient and more dignified.

All of the stakeholders involved in EBT are committed to making this happen. The private sector certainly has the technology and ability to develop the solutions. More and more states are becoming interested in making the transition from paper to plastic. The Food and Nutrition Service has been working on the infrastructure and operating principles that must underlie any technology solution. Food retailers favor EBT, and WIC EBT shoppers are effusive in their praise of the new system.

But there are numerous obstacles that remain before we see WIC EBT have the bandwidth that the Food Stamp program enjoyed within as little as 7 years after Reading. One of these obstacles is the legacy systems that many states use to operate their WIC programs. Many of these are old and out of date. States continue to transfer systems from one to another in hopes of modernizing their WIC MIS; however, many questions remain. Chief among these is should a state wait to bring up a new WIC EBT system until it installs a new WIC MIS, or can they bring up EBT on their existing system.

This is just one of the many WIC EBT challenges we'll tackle head-on at this year's conference. We're at the point where there is a growing body of experience out there. What we need now is to pull it together in some sort of best practices for state's looking to go EBT.

We'll try to get that started when we meeting in New Orleans in November.

1 comment:

  1. What's needed is a check-list of what has to happen before a state can add EBT to its WIC MIS

    ReplyDelete