Effort to upgrade Arkansas child welfare computer system fails after two years

This story was originally published by the Arkansas Advocate.

A multimillion-dollar plan to revamp Arkansas’ child welfare information system ended in failure last year, but state officials say the current system still meets their needs.

The Arkansas Department of Human Services terminated its contract with Chicago-based RedMane Technology last September after the contractor did not deliver the product the state wanted, according to documents obtained via the state Freedom of Information Act.

RedMane Technology inked a $44 million deal with Kansas in July for a similar project.

Emails and reports obtained from DHS document RedMane’s lack of progress on the project and state officials’ subsequent frustration over the course of two years.

DHS and RedMane “mutually agreed to end the project” in August 2024, agency spokesperson Gavin Lesnick said that month in response to media inquiries.

“The project ended because a viable product was not developed within the contractually agreed time, scope, and budget parameters,” according to the project’s final progress report issued last September.

Since 1997, Arkansas has kept records of child maltreatment reports and cases using the Children’s Reporting and Information System (CHRIS). The Arkansas Child Abuse Hotline, which is part of the system, received 8,154 reports between Jan. 1 and March 31 of this year, DHS reported to lawmakers in May.

The state sought to update CHRIS, a federally recognized Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System, because of financial incentives under a 2016 federal rule that gives states “a more favorable cost allocation” if they switch to a Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System.

DHS’ Division of Children and Family Services (DCFS) tasked RedMane with creating this new system, called ARfocus, starting March 1, 2022, according to the original contract. The contract set a maximum cost of $10.9 million for the first year of what was expected to be a seven-year, $26.2 million project.

The contract was amended four times, with the final one signed in November 2023. At that time, the agreement projected $14.3 million through February 2025 and $26.7 million through February 2029.

The state paid $12.2 million to RedMane between April 2022 and January of this year, according to invoices the Advocate obtained via FOIA.

CHRIS is “fully capable of meeting all our needs at this time,” but a new system “built on modern cloud-based software that uses a mobile-friendly application” would be more efficient, Lesnick told the Advocate.

“It’s less about the current system not working and more about the need to support future upgrades and compatibility,” he said.

'This Just Isn't Acceptable'

RedMane was supposed to build the ARfocus database on a “modern and mobile-friendly case management system [that] will allow users to work and collaborate in ways the previous system simply could not,” according to an April 2022 news release from RedMane announcing the project. The news release noted that RedMane was opening a Little Rock office.

“Implementing this system will be transformative to how DCFS staff engage and support the children, families, and caregivers we serve,” then-DCFS Director Mischa Martin said at the time.

Nearly a year and a half later, Martin emailed RedMane with “significant concerns” about the functionality of ARfocus and RedMane’s capacity to fix things.

The Arkansas State Police’s Child Abuse Hotline staff had been “consistently reporting about the system slowness” since ARfocus launched on May 30, 2023, Martin told RedMane staff in her Sept. 11, 2023 email.

Hotline administrator Dan Mack said in an August 2023 email to DHS staff that ARfocus was “creeping along.”

“We’re getting killed every day at the same time and it’s taking us hours to recover,” Mack said. “This just isn’t acceptable.”

RedMane staff attributed the “slowness” to “an ASP infrastructure issue” in an email to DCFS earlier that month.

Other issues included failed mandated reporter portals and “stalled servers that appear to have not been monitored,” Martin wrote. RedMane had not resolved the issues “despite the daily stand-up calls and deployment efforts,” she added.

“Even if these issues are fixed and resolved, we are concerned about the product quality and the impact for the next major phase [of implementation],” Martin wrote. “This would be a project failure if we had rolled out the entire system to statewide field staff and stakeholders. Our organization values the partnership we have had with RedMane, but the ongoing problems have eroded our confidence in your ability to deliver reliable and high-quality code.”

Martin left DHS in October 2023 and is now running for state Senate. She declined an interview for this article.

RedMane did not respond to calls and emails requesting comment.

More Frustrations

Virginia-based Maximus Human Services monitored and assessed RedMane’s performance on the development of ARfocus throughout the project. As of February 2025, DHS had paid Maximus more than $6 million over five years.

Maximus’ monthly reports on ARfocus, starting in October 2022 and ending in August 2024, detailed the fraught working relationship between RedMane and DCFS.

A seven-week delay of the first phase of the ARfocus rollout cost the state $158,000, Maximus reported in March 2023.

“And even with this extra time, there is a continuing disconnect between the State’s expectations and RedMane’s system configurations,” the report states.

By June 2024, ARfocus had “by far exceeded the cost we anticipated and is now totalling about 400% of what we had projected,” RedMane principal Colin Michaelis wrote in an email to DCFS staff. “This has left RedMane in an untenable fiscal position.”

Michaelis suggested making several changes to the project, including “for the state to share the fiscal burden for completing the implementation of ARFocus on a 50/50 basis for the work remaining.”

Tiffany Wright, Martin’s successor as DCFS director, said the suggestions needed to be more specific.

“I have asked for this several times based upon the two months of conversations we have been having and also how it impacts the larger project,” Wright wrote later in June 2024.

By July, DHS officials expected the project “to continue to move forward as currently agreed,” said Jeff Dean, chief information officer in DHS’ Office of Information Technology.

“We’ll be happy to celebrate with you when the project actually starts hitting milestones,” Dean wrote in an email to RedMane.

At the time, RedMane staff had been “looking to hopefully reduce some of the complexity” of the design of ARfocus, but as of July 2024, there still was no scheduled meeting to discuss such changes, “nor have we been given a list of what areas this could be found in,” DHS’ ARfocus project director, Miranda Raines, wrote in an email to RedMane.

RedMane continued to bill the state during the project’s unwinding from August 2024 to January 2025, according to invoices from the company.

The state is still using CHRIS to keep records of child welfare cases, and the federal Administration for Children and Families considers the program transitional in anticipation of a future Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System, according to its website.

Lesnick noted that despite the problems with the project, it resulted in the launch of the Arkansas Mandated Reporter Portal, a secure webpage for mandated reporters to submit reports of child maltreatment.

“While we regret that the project with RedMane did not come to fruition, we remain focused on bettering our platform to ensure we are providing the best resources to staff so we can best serve families in need going forward,” Lesnick said.

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.