Category 2: Delivering Excellence in Digital Services
CLAUDINE MCCARTHY
Director of Communications
Division of Medicaid Services (DMS)
Wisconsin Department of Health Services
Claudine McCarthy is being honored in Category 2: Delivering Simple, Seamless, and Secure Services for transforming how the Wisconsin Department of Health Services communicates with residents during critical moments. Through her leadership, DHS has adopted a modern, member-centered approach that prioritizes clear, timely, multilingual, and accessible communications. Her efforts were especially impactful during the 2025 federal government shutdown, when she coordinated rapid outreach to ensure families relying on SNAP benefits understood their benefit status, available resources, and next steps.
During the shutdown, Claudine led an omnichannel communications strategy spanning email, text messages, web banners, push notifications, and traditional mail. Five rapid outreach waves provided information in English, Spanish, and Hmong, resulting in more than 407,000 emails with a 98.78% delivery rate and nearly 799,000 text messages. Beyond emergency communications, she has championed human-centered research, plain-language standards, multilingual outreach, and accessibility improvements while introducing more efficient internal processes that reduced review time for DHS operational memos by 30%.
Claudine's leadership has created a more personalized and responsive experience for Wisconsinites accessing essential benefits and services. She pioneered the Communication Preference Center within the ACCESS benefits portal, empowering members to choose how they receive important information and manage their communication preferences. She also guided the modernization of ACCESS and implementation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud to deliver more relevant, accessible communications at scale. By combining technology, resident feedback, and operational discipline, Claudine has made critical government information easier to understand and access while strengthening trust between Wisconsin residents and the services they depend on.