JELS Child Welfare eDocument Transfer

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2022

The Justice Electronic System (JELS) first implemented several years ago, has grown precipitously over the past number of years to now include over 30 individual County and local agencies, and provide service to over 2000 individual users. In 2021, JELS was further expanded to automate the electronic distribution of necessary CWS Child Welfare Reports and Minute Orders from Dependency Court proceedings directly into the privately held computer case management systems of Delinquency Legal Services, Children’s Legal Services, and Voices for Children. The County Technology Office, paid for these interfaces to be built to private systems, something that government agencies normally do not do. As a result, over 50,000 multi-page reports formerly printed, collated, and delivered by County CWS workers to the DLS, CLS, and CASA organizations, are no longer manually handled. The JELS system identifies the entitled agency and once uploaded by CWS, auto-delivers the required reports to the recipient systems – eliminating all the previous manually work both by CWS and by those agencies. For a one-time cost of $25,000, this program saves the County about $75,000/annually in labor costs and $125-150k/annually in paper.. More importantly, it provides those agencies with enhanced functionality as described by Matt Olsen, Director of Voices for Children: “Due to the work of all parties involved in the creation of the JELS/CasaManager portal, Voices for Children’s program administrative processes have been truly transformed. We are now paperless and have significantly reduced staff time spent processing dependency minute orders and CWS reports.,,”