Reference no: EM13749335

Business Issue

Recent events have underscored the need to critically, thoroughly and immediately examine the structure and mechanisms employed by the Counties and the State to protect and to provide critical services to children in need and increase accountability for child welfare agencies. There is not a consistent standardized approach for coordinating services and sharing information among State and local agencies.

Child protective services program is currently supported by three legacy systems, namely Central Registry, Services Information System and Child Placement and Payment System rather than a statewide integrated Case Management System. The threelegacy systems have several limitations and do not meet the needs of the State or the Counties. This has led to gaps in information and driven many Counties to operate their own independent case management systems with little or no information sharing.
Limitations include:

• The State Central System lack near real-time information regarding child assessments. The lack of access to current information severely inhibits both entry and retrieval of information relevant to conducting family assessments. Current policy requires assessment information to be entered into the Central Registry once the assessment is completed. As a result valuable case information is not available in the state systems for 30 to 45 days after the initial involvement with the family.

• The State Central Systemtracks and retains minimal information of a child as a result, key attributes are not available. Examples of missing information include; a child's caretaker's personal identifiable information, child's address details, etc.

• County case worker's access to child and family information is limited to their individual's county information.

• County case worker's lack of mobile connectivity access to timely information is limited.

• The State Central Systemis based on individual child data. The ability to identify or link information on family members or members of the same household is non-existent or at best, limited only to certain cases and difficult to do. As a result, social workers do not have access to identify caretakers or inappropriate individuals living in the home using the state systems.

• There is no unique statewide identifier for a child to track their movement across counties. Consequently investigators and caseworkers are not able to consider the history of a child in a timely fashion while providing current services. Lack of near real-time information about a child puts them at risk for abuse and neglect and increases the chance of child fatalities. Each county assigns a child an id.

• While many counties operate automated case management systems, others use paper records and then record information from those records into the systems. This practice is antiquated, inefficient, and can result in incorrect keying as well as increasing the latency period between providing services and reporting.

• Aside from lacking much information that could be of significant use to counties, the legacy systems are written in dated programming languages making modifications and enhancements difficult, creating a high risk of partial or complete system failure. This inhibits the State's ability to provide new information to the counties or to make system changes needed to comply with mandated reporting requirements.

Scope of Work

The goal of the Child Protective Services pilot project is to enhance coordination of services and information amount county departments of social services, local law enforcement agencies and the court system.

Project Description: (Approach and High Level requirements)

The pilot project will leverage the CARC tools and capabilities to integrate State and County data to provide a more informed view of a child and family services.

The pilot project will follow a three phased approach.

The initial phase objective will be to build a common identifier for a child to link child records across counties. This intial phase will mine data from the Service Data Warehouse for Central Registry, Service Information, Child Care Payment and Child Placement and

Payment for purposes of:

• Perform data analysis and determine data quality and the feasibility of building a common identifier for a child.

• Perform Extraction, Transformation and Load of the HHS Client Services Data Warehouse for Central Registry, Service Information, Subsidized Child Care and Child Placement and Payment data into the CARC data warehouse.

• Perform entity resolution of the child and create a unique identifier.

• Provide a simple responsive web application with the following features:
o Look-up a child based on search criteria
o A grid or table displaying all children that match the search criteria
o A dashboard displaying the details of the selected child along with the counties that the child was served in the past between certain dates
o Application of role based security to provide restricted access to information on the pages based on the user role and authorization
o Ability to screen print or export child detailed information into PDF or other file formats

• The web application will be integrated with CPID to support user authentication.

The second phase of the pilot project will develop a simple dashboard linking the family to the child. Additional Health and Human Services and other state department data sources will be used to build a more comprehensive view of the child and family. For example, JADSE data will provide criminal and sex offender information on the caretaker of the child.

The following high level requirements include:

• ETL of the identifiedHHS data sources into CARC data warehouse

• Perform matching of the child to the caretaker by integrating the necessary data sources in HHS and additional State data sources

• Perform linkage of child, family and address

• Perform integration with JADSE data to provide indicators if the caretaker or someone living in the house is a sex-offender or has criminal history

• Develop a comprehensivemodel of a child by synthesizing information from phase one, HHS data sources and JADSE data. The child's view will contain demographic and caretaker information along with indicators or flags of other services. For example, family indicators could show if the the household was eligible for food and nutrition services, Mediciad, subsidized child care, or if there was a prior assessment completed for the child.

• Perform enhancement of the Web Application to add address, family/caretaker and social service indicators that the child is receiving from other agencies.
The following data sources will be used for data integration in the second phase:

• JADSE, Sex offender Registry, Concealed Hand Gun Permit

• CPPS

• Child Development

• Food and Nutrition Services

• Work First Family Assistance

• DMV

• Medicaid

• Mental Health and Substance Abuse

• Public Health

• Vital Records - Birth

• Blind Services

• Aging and Adult Services

• Vocational Rehabilitation