Écrit par : Amita Prabhu, Senior Engagement Manager, Adobe Digital Strategy Group
Every year, $30 billion in public benefits goes unclaimed. This includes benefits that eligible residents qualified for, applied for, or should have received, but didn’t. The reasons are familiar to most people working in human services: the process was too complicated, the form was too hard to complete on a phone, someone didn’t know where to start and couldn’t get an answer quickly enough to keep going.
A resident’s digital experience may not explain the whole gap but it does play an influential role in how benefits are received today.
Adobe’s 2026 Digital Government Index* assessed digital maturity across all 50 state government websites, with a focused evaluation of every state’s health and human services (HHS) agency. We scored six capabilities that directly shape whether a resident can find, apply for, and complete enrollment in public benefits. Our analysis suggests that HHS agencies communicate services relatively well but residents experience friction points in online application processes.
The Gap Between Access and Enrollment
Most agencies make it easy to find out that a program exists. Across all 50 states, 98% of HHS agency homepages surface some form of program information, and site search is present and functional at 94% of agencies. For someone trying to understand what help is available, the front door is reasonably open.
The experience breaks down when residents begin the application process.
One in five HHS agencies have no resident account functionality at all. This means there is no clearly visible login, no way to save progress, no way to come back and pick up where you left off. Among the 80% that offer some form of account access, only 16% have made it prominent enough that a resident would actually notice it on the homepage. For an enrollment process that often spans multiple sessions and requires document uploads, the absence of a reliable account experience is a structural barrier to completion.
Forms have a similar friction point. Virtually every agency (98%) has moved their forms online. Only 2% of agencies offer enrollment that doesn’t still route residents through a PDF download, a printable document, or a process that breaks on a mobile device. Nearly every state has digitized the form. Almost none have digitized the end to end experience of completing it.
Eighty percent of HHS agencies offer no chat functionality of any kind, meaning no bot, no live agent. Of the 20% that do, nearly all are static menu-driven tools that can point residents toward a page but can’t answer a question. This means that for residents who get stuck mid-application at night (which is when people with full time jobs and caregiving responsibilities have the most time to navigate benefits enrollment) there is nowhere to go for help.
Steps Toward Stronger Digital Engagement
The agencies with the strongest scores in our assessment built towards a capability in sequence, and the pattern is instructive for agencies thinking about where to start.
The most important first step is a reliable resident account experience. This is critical to ensure forms can be pre-populated, share application status, and tailor follow up communications. Friction-heavy enrollment processes trace back to agencies not knowing who they’re talking to when a resident returns to a site. Getting account creation in place and making it visible enough that residents use it is the prerequisite for most of the improvements that follow.
Once residents can log in, the next priority is making sure the enrollment process they land in works end to end. That means leveraging web-based forms, progress that saves between sessions, and a mobile experience that functions as well as the desktop version. Twelve percent of agencies are currently in a partial state on forms.
They have moved beyond basic PDFs but not yet reached fully frictionless enrollment, suggesting that this is where a lot of agencies are already working. Finishing that transition is more achievable than starting something new.
Chat support is the most underdeveloped capability in the dataset, but it benefits significantly from the groundwork laid by the first two investments. A chat tool that can access a resident’s account information and application status is meaningfully more useful than one operating without any context. Starting with a well-designed FAQ-based tool that covers the most common eligibility questions is a realistic near-term step for most agencies. The more sophisticated AI-assisted guidance that can proactively surface next steps and route across programs comes later, and it comes more easily when the underlying data infrastructure is already in place.
The $30 billion in unclaimed benefits can reduce every time an agency makes it meaningfully easier for an eligible resident to complete what they started. The 2026 Digital Government Index shows what it would take for HHS agencies to change that.
* View Adobe’s 2025 U.S. Digital Government Index. The 2026 report will be released later this summer. Adobe’s Digital Government Index evaluates digital maturity across U.S. state government websites annually. For more information or to discuss your agency’s benchmarking results, contact Amita Prabhu.
Sources: National Council on Aging (2025); Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy (2026); Equifax Social Services Outlook Index (2026); Deloitte GovTech Trends Report (2026); Adobe Digital Government Index (2026).
À propos de l'auteur
Amita Prabhu
Senior Engagement Manager, Adobe Digital Strategy Group
Amita Prabhu is a Senior Engagement Manager in Adobe’s Digital Strategy Group, where she advises state and local governments on transforming digital experiences and operations. With more than a decade of experience across consulting and technology, she brings a genuine passion for serving mission-driven organizations and applies that focus to initiatives in digital equity, accessibility, and customer experience with depth in health and human services.
Cet article a été rédigé par un membre de l'APHSA. Partenaire stratégique de l’industrie. Les points de vue et opinions exprimés sont ceux de l'auteur (ou des auteurs) et ne représentent pas nécessairement les opinions de l'APHSA.