By: Marty Elisco, CEO of Augintel
Driven by federal policy and funding, child protection organizations across the United States, are undertaking the largest IT modernization effort in 30 years to streamline operations and better support the important work of their staff. The State of Illinois Department of Children and Family Services serves more than 60,000 families each year, making it one of the largest child protection organizations in the US and its approach to modernization is one of the most comprehensive and innovative. Encouraged by the agency director’s guidance to “embrace bold thinking” both IT and agency leadership committed to finding innovative solutions to transform the State’s child welfare technology in a way that would positively impact agency staff, the agency overall, and most importantly family outcomes.
Accessing the unstructured data in case notes became key to achieving that goal. Agency leadership knew that caseworkers spend too much time combing through narrative data —reading typed or handwritten case notes — to understand the story of the family and think through potential courses of action. DCFS leadership knew that the ability to read, summarize and present the information in the notes would save staff valuable time and give them a complete view of the family’s story such as their risks and strengths, their family support structure and the social determinants that impact the family’s ability to thrive.
DCFS chose Natural Language Processing platform Augintel to solve the unstructured data problem. Augintel quickly searches through electronic case information and finds pertinent case notes, data, key words, and applicable family members, eliminating the need for caseworkers to mine the data themselves. And the agency benefits from the ability to query case notes across all cases to identify best practices and trends across the agency, to monitor for early warning signs of issues to be addressed and to inform service array.
Nearly a year into rollout Illinois DCFS is seeing the benefits. In a survey at the end of 2023, staff indicated time savings across tasks such as coming up to speed on a new case, preparing for court hearings, identifying family members, or preparing reports. Survey respondents estimated a time savings of up to 5 hours each week. To quote a user, “It is like having a watchful “program assistant” backing me up which is allowing me to address issues or see positives faster.” Quality assurance specialists are now easily able to identify cases that fall outside practice guidelines for conversations, visits, or documentation and take necessary action. And the information in case notes is helping to identify needs for language assistance, housing, and disability services. As one example, querying the information in case notes enabled DCFS to identify 30% more cases requiring support for specific disabilities than had previously been known – information that impacts resource requirements for the agency and outcomes for those individuals.
When speaking about the value of implementing NLP, Illinois DCFS Director Marc D. Smith said, “Saving time and using technology to solve problems that directly benefits our families and staff is the ultimate win”.