Project IDENTITY

About the Program

Category: Health (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that children enter child welfare protective custody with significant health needs, including acute illnesses (e.g., infections, communicable diseases), chronic medical conditions (e.g., asthma), developmental delays (e.g., speech delay) and mental and behavioral health concerns. In response to this, most states mandate that children entering protective custody be examined by a medical care provider around the time children enter protective custody, and often also with changes in placement. However, health information is frequently not accessible to child welfare frontline workers, either at the time that children enter custody or when placement changes are occurring, resulting in a failure to communicate health histories to new caregivers or to ensure that children are placed in environments where their health needs can be met. This lack of integrated health information for children in protective custody likely contributes to increased healthcare costs, ineffective healthcare delivery, and placement instability.More recently, advances in informatics and computer science as well as an openness to enhancing data-based tools for child welfare workers has created an opportunity for child welfare agencies to provide enhanced and integrated information to be used at the point of care. This has been applied more predominantly to decision-support tools at the time of screening, to identify where to stratify services for families involved with child welfare, or to understand patterns in healthcare utilization via Medicaid billing data. Project IDENTITY integrates healthcare and child welfare information to be shared and used at the point-of-care, leading to improved health outcomes for children and families in protective custody.