Wisconsin speeds up licensing amid shift to cloud platform
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By
Chris Teale
The state saw a 35% increase in the number of licenses it issued in 2023-2024 compared to any other two-year period.
Between 2023 and 2024, the Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services issued 114,000 licenses, which represented a 35% increase over any other two-year period in the state’s history.
It meant around $54 million in additional wages for workers in the state, as they could get licensed and hired more quickly, rather than wait for DSPS to process their application and supporting paperwork. And it came after the state embraced a shift to a cloud-based occupational licensing portal, which it first started using in May 2022.
Wisconsin started using its new self-guided system, Salesforce Customer 360 Platform for Government, for licensing nurses, the largest category of the more than 200 occupational licenses offered by the state. It has since expanded to include licensing pharmacists, and now officials are piloting an effort to license dentists. The state also includes business licensing in its portal.
Moving to the new system has been a complex task, sparked initially by an influx of federal COVID-19 relief funds, and it has dramatically reduced the time it takes for professionals to get licensed in the state, down from several months to, on average, two to three weeks.
Dan Hereth, Wisconsin’s Secretary of Safety and Professional Services, said much of the delays in licensing come from post-graduate requirements.
“I think about it as an assembly line,” Hereth told Route Fifty in an interview at Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour event in Washington, D.C., last week. “It's not just that I'm building one product with a very defined set of suppliers. I'm building 240 different products, and I'm doing that with each product line having sometimes multiple different suppliers for that end product. Put simply, it's herding cats.”
Rather than the previous process, which involved employees physically reviewing every piece of paper submitted by an applicant, the portal and the use of artificial intelligence allows for what Hereth described as “passive review.” That means that nurses or other licensees can submit their graduation requirements for review and be approved to schedule their national exams as soon as they graduate.
Colleges and universities can then log into the portal and approve a candidate’s graduation themselves, meaning graduates can take their exam and get licensed sometimes as soon as within three days of graduation. Students, too, can log in and see their progress and gain far more insight and transparency int what they need to do.
“It’s allowed us to really start to create a culture shift, more of an ownership,” Hereth said. “Instead of sending a piece of paper somewhere and expecting something to happen, now they can see, ‘Oh, I'm inside of a process, and these are the things that are my responsibility and how I can help drive that process forward.’”
It’s a similar story for pharmacy students, who must take exams after graduating that are administered by one national body, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy. One will now be a pre-graduation exam that students take before a clinical rotation, while students will be able to schedule their other exam up to three months ahead of time. With their paperwork being reviewed in the portal, it means there are fewer delays between graduating to being officially licensed, and so it is quicker for them to gain employment.
Passive review may sound risky, especially as there is always a chance that someone could slip through the net and be licensed despite not meeting all their requirements. But Hereth said there will continue to be human review to verify that someone has graduated, to minimize that risk.
“Our calculation was that, quite frankly, we're going to verify graduation before we issue that license,” he said. “If someone tests and they waste $400 they shouldn’t have wasted, is that really an adverse outcome? Certainly, for that individual, but for the process, not really.”
Dental students are up next, in an effort made easier by the fact that Wisconsin has one dental school in the state: the Marquette University School of Dentistry. Hereth said the state is piloting a similar approach, where candidates’ documents are reviewed in parallel to them scheduling their final examinations. It should again result in faster license approvals and help solve the state’s dentist shortage.
Much of the talk in recent months has been around government efficiency, and in particular whether technology and AI can help speed up what have traditionally been slow processes. Several states have looked to follow the federal government’s lead and establish executive commissions and legislative committees to see where they can be more efficient.
Hereth said that it can be tough for agencies to measure efficiency, but it is not always about just getting things done quicker.
“Faster for faster’s sake isn't always better, and I'm not even talking about quality,” he said. “If I'm a business and I can do something 25% faster, but it costs me 50% more, that doesn't necessarily generate a return. In government, I think there is a big push because faster is always viewed as efficient. … It's probably a combination of managing expectations through transparency and then also trying to focus on the result … It's about, how can we efficiently and effectively navigate that person from point A to point B?”