California Stakeholder Recommendations Enhance Electronic Care Coordination Child Welfare Services System

California Stakeholder Recommendations Enhance Electronic Care Coordination Child Welfare Services System

August 10, 2016
Health Care, Research

Designing California’s New Child Welfare Case Management System to Promote Care Coordination and Empower Youth

 The development of California’s new Child Welfare Services Case Management System (CWS-NS) has the potential to make sure individuals involved in caring for children and youth in foster care—health care providers, social workers, foster parents, and foster youth themselves—have the information they need to make decisions and deliver critical services. Technology improvements will support greater communication and information sharing, allowing foster care teams (those involved in caring for children and youth in foster care) to overcome the challenges posed by frequent changes in health care providers, foster care placements, and schools. Such challenges currently contribute to a disjointed system of care that compounds the unique health and academic needs that children in foster care often face.The Children’s Partnership convened a diverse stakeholder workgroup that developed recommendations and a roadmap to engage directly with the full care team, as well as with foster youth.
The recommendations call for a CWS-NS that employs user-specific portals to:

  • provide a platform for direct communication across the care team;
  • gather timely and complete information about a child in care; and
  • provide secure access to select information about a child for purposes of care coordination and treatment.

The approach proposed in these recommendations advances the use of bi-directional, cross-sector data exchange in a manner that lines up with new federal Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (CCWIS) rules.

 

Read the report and accompanying appendices: Developing California’s New Child Welfare Case Management System to Support Children and Youth Through Better Information and Data Exchange.

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