Technology - Overview

American Public Human Services Association

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Overview

Positive outcomes for vulnerable children, youth and families are supported when technology options are used appropriately to improve agency effectiveness, efficiency and communication. In fact, technology is one of the most crucial supports to a public child welfare agency’s service delivery and it is imperative that leaders understand the organizational and practice challenges for which it can offer solutions.

In the world today, technology is continuously improving and evolving. It is an increasingly important tool that impacts the way public child welfare agencies conduct business. As technology advances, effective agencies are able to use it to gather, access, manage and disseminate information and increase the workforce capacities to deliver and track services. Additionally, technology can enhance all internal and external communication strategies with all staff, stakeholders and children, youth and families.

Agencies cannot operate the way they did years ago. Frontline public child welfare program staff persons are increasingly dependent on technology-driven support and tools to carry out their jobs. Technology also contributes to successful administrative, monitoring, management and budget functions.

Role of Technology in Public Child Welfare

Technology in this guidance refers to hardware and software tools and includes methods and techniques for converting, storing, protecting, processing, transmitting and retrieving information as necessary to meet the needs of all other agency operations.¹ Technology rather than Information Technology (IT) is used because the focus of this discussion is on the technology infrastructure requirements needed to effectively use electronic and digital devices to support all of the agency’s functions. Our intent is to separate the procurement and maintenance of the electronic hardware and software equipment and program design from the gathering and use of the data it stores. IT may incorporate a variety of tasks within a specific agency depending on the structure of the agency. In this guidance, technology may be thought of as a subset of IT that is closely linked to Information Management (IM).

Technology infrastructure is the physical hardware and software used to connect electronic devices to users and includes:

Personal computers (laptops and desktops) and other traditional computer hardware and software used for electronic case recording and service tracking and planning.
Software program applications used to input, send, receive and manage internet and intranet information.
Software program applications developed for data input, storage, backup and retrieval.
Transmission of media; such as telephone lines, cable television lines, satellites and antennas.
Mainframe applications.
Server-based technologies such as windows and other operating systems that run hardware applications.
Network technologies; such as routers, aggregators and repeaters.
Office networks; such as local area networks (LAN), wide area networks (WAN) and wireless.
Remote connections to office networks such as virtual private networks (VPN), voice recognition and automatic transcription download.
E-mail.
Web based applications and other devices that control transmission paths as well as telephone systems and equipment (cell phones, PDAs, voice mail, “live” on line meetings).
Video equipment; including televisions, projectors.

The Purpose of this Guidance

This guidance provides agency leaders and their teams with what they need to know to make effective decisions about how to use technology to support their agency’s mission. It discusses the selection of hardware and software and looks at ways to: 1) build political will for technical investments; 2) effectively implement the use of technology through staff involvement and training; and 3) work with stakeholders to balance the need for information sharing among service providers while addressing the confidentiality to which children, youth and families are entitled. Though technology has much to contribute to positive outcomes, it is not immune to the difficulties posed by high initial costs, inevitable system failures and steep user learning curves. Nonetheless, technology clearly enhances the delivery of public child welfare services and will continue to have an impact on all areas of an agency’s structure.

The Guidance Provides Answers to These and Other Questions:

What is the role of technology in public child welfare?
What issues should be addressed in constructing a comprehensive and effective technology strategy?
What policies, processes and protocols need to be in place to support the technology strategy and for appropriate use of equipment?
How does one align an agency’s technology plan with its mission and structure?
What elements of agency culture, climate and capacity warrant attention in developing a technology infrastructure?
How does one integrate technology into established practice models and administrative systems?
How can technology meet the needs that emerge in the Information Management Systems?
What are the components and practical considerations of an effective technology plan?
How can one build support for the use of new technology among stakeholders, staff and children, youth and families served?
Where and with whom should responsibility be vested for the implementation, monitoring and continuous improvement of a technology strategy?
What factors may enhance or hinder the efforts to build effective technology strategies and how should these be addressed?
What ethical principles should govern information sharing and confidentiality?
What works when it comes to training staff in the use of technology?

Why is this Critical Area Important to the Field of Public Child Welfare?

Technology is an important tool for any modern organization. In public child welfare agencies it can:

Ease the collection and analysis of data and promote consistency in assessment and decision-making for case management, meeting federal, state and local standards and planning for quality improvement. Provides hardware and software packages that incorporate the data fields identified by administrators, support and program staff which are needed for tracking contact with children, youth and families served, accessing resources and inputting and retrieving statistical data.
Enhance the management and tracking of financial data by creating systems that store financial data in formats that make it easy to track assets, bills paid and accounts outstanding, as well as identify deficit spending.
Help produce quality information that can be readily taken to governing bodies to request support and funding and inform public policy.
Improve the process of communication and information exchange between agency staff, other agencies and the children, youth and families served.
Manage the equipment to support and build an effective and efficient mobile workforce.
Enhance learning opportunities with on line meetings and trainings.
Improve productivity by helping workers manage their time, organize their workloads and reduce administrative burdens at all staff levels. Automated tracking systems can generate tasks and appointments with due dates.
Contribute to workforce recruitment and retention. Job descriptions and applications can be accessed online.
Promote more timely and updated information access to the children, youth and families served as well as the agency’s partners, resulting in improved services through data driven decision-making and lower overhead.
Allow large amounts of information to be stored, shared easily and protected from fire, flood or other loss.
Provide the tools for continuous tracking of case activity and client outcomes and the means to evaluate the agency’s overall impact and efficiency.

How will Outcomes be Achieved For and With Children, Youth and Families?

Technolgy can be used to:

Make it easier and quicker to link available resources with children, youth and families’ needs and identify eligibility standards for service.
Enable better use of existing resources for faster, successful placements by linking child and caregiver characteristics.
Create feedback loops and generate reminders for workers, enabling efficient use of time for service delivery.
Make it possible for data to be more accurate, valid, reliable and timely due to the ease of recording, the ability to report immediately from the field, as well as enabling programming that eliminates the entry of duplicate, inaccurate and/or inconsistent information. This promotes evidence-driven decision-making with the ability to adjust protocols and identify gaps in service arrays and practice problems at the case level that can inform program improvements.
Enable agencies to identify demographic trends and their impact on children, youth and families’ outcomes.

For example, the number and type of foster homes needed in a specific geographic area can be identified and guide recruitment efforts. In an effort to address disparities and disproportionality, agency leaders can work with technology personnel to use existing data fields or create new ones to collect information on various aspects of service delivery for the children, youth and families they serve.

Impact the budget process by enabling real-time data to be made available to legislators and other funders.

Addressing Tensions to Maximize Opportunity

Technology comes with challenges as well as benefits. In this era of rapid technological development, agencies need to see that technology enhancements support and are driven by the needs of their business plans. Technology has altered case practice and agencies are challenged to change as practice evolves. Doing so requires an analysis of benefits, opportunities, barriers and risks. Throughout the process it is important to involve end users. Their buy-in will help technology enhance practice and minimize the resistance that major changes inevitably generate.

Though the electronic mechanisms may streamline service delivery and ease staff workload, its most important impact should be improved outcomes for the children, youth and families served. But even the most promising innovations may have unintended effects. Here are some examples:

Data Driven Decision Versus Human Relationships
Technology can make sound information available to frontline workers and supervisors responsible for placing children in the least restrictive setting, in the closest proximity to a child’s family/home of origin and with the greatest chance that the child will thrive. However, old habits are hard to break and there may be a tendency to place children in facilities where the staff have developed strong personal or professional relationships. Management needs to take steps to get staff to embrace a new way of thinking. It may require customizing the placement approval process to require data driven decisions, with exceptions clearly spelled out. Once workers have the satisfaction of seeing children benefit from evidence-based judgments, they will likely embrace the process.

Increase or Reduce Face-To-Face Time with Clients
Frontline service staff may find entering information from the field allows them to increase the time they can spend with clients. On the other hand, if an inordinate amount of data entry is required, face time with clients may actually be reduced. Technology has increased expectations for data to be provided for multiple purposes such as federal, state and local statistics that may be used by policymakers and other funders. Agencies must determine and balance just how much information is necessary to deliver high quality services and how much information is required to maximize accountability. All data should be collected for a purpose, not just because technology makes the collection feasible.

Clinical Case Practice and Case Management Continuum
The function of the public child welfare agency frontline staff is to assess and meet the needs of the children, youth and families who come to their attention. In addition, they must document the actions taken to meet these needs. Technology may change how this is done. For example, technology may enable child welfare workers to connect children, youth and families to community resources immediately from the field during the first contact. When agency staff do not have to make repeated home visits to strengthen families or look at length for appropriate services, they can take on new responsibilities, such as case management or psychotherapy. This may result in changes in job classifications. Any initial discomfort that staff may feel in the face of these changes should be overcome by the satisfaction they experience in seeing families thrive.

Enhances Communication or a Threat to Confidentiality
Using social networking to communicate with the children, youth and families may be seen as a practice enhancement. On the other hand, it can pose a threat to confidentiality. The same dilemma also applies to sharing information electronically with partners. Clear rules and policies that place parameters on this type of communication need to be adopted. Both staff and the children, youth and families that may use the technology need to be trained on the rules and informed of the risks that not following guidelines may generate.