Understanding Policy as Code Engine (PaCE) and the Social Benefits Playbook

PaCE enables you to manage, administer, and audit eligibility rules (policies) from a centralized location.

Policy as Code Engine (PaCE) is a powerful, low code rules engine capable of processing rules in seconds. This engine allows process owners and admins to create and maintain the rules that drive eligibility determination and benefits. The rule-sets created within this rules engine are called policies.

A PaCE policy is a set of pre-defined rules and logic that determines the desired behavior of an application or a service. When invoked, the rules in the policy are applied on the provided input, and a decision is reached. This decision-making is the main function of PaCE and helps determine if a policy is compliant or non-compliant. The decision is then relayed to the software calling service or application, so that it can act on it to enforce a desired behavior.

With PaCE, admins and process owners can:

• Create a policy to build out the logic determining eligibility and benefits.
• Use templates to pre-define logic and data sources, quick-starting policy creation
• Map policies to one or more benefit types
• Pilot new policies using a test playground
• Audit policy executions with built-in reporting of decisions, statuses, and processing times.

PaCE also allows a full life cycle management of policies, reuse of existing policies, Testing and validation of policies, and central automation of compliance, audits, and regulatory processes. Policy developers can view and understand an existing policy, make and assess changes, and decide if a policy can be used as a baseline for another policy. They can also use PaCE before debugging to understand how the policy should work, and why it is not working as expected.

PaCE can be used to:

• Make decisions (compliant or non-compliant) based on a change in the application or service.
• Automate execution of policies.
• Standardize policies so that they can be shared and reused within a service and across services.
• Collect evidence and proof of compliance for audit purposes. This feature can be used by internal auditors to automate the process of collecting evidence for governance and risk requirements.

The Social Benefits Playbook Eligibility Rules Engine, powered by PaCE, evaluates case data against pre-defined eligibility rules for faster decision-making.