Maryland’s foster care matching platform demonstrates continued success
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The state’s Department of Human Services is seeing staff spend less time on manual administrative work and more time connecting youth with caregivers after a system modernization project, one official says.
Child well-being is regularly a priority for state lawmakers across the U.S., particularly as an estimated 331,747 youths nationwide stayed in foster care last year. In a bid to reduce the number of children entering and staying in foster care, Maryland has adopted a family-matching platform through which officials are already seeing efficiency gains.
Across the U.S., states’ progress toward uplifting vulnerable children is often made more difficult by technological limitations from outdated and clunky child welfare information systems, said Terri Lowther, an out-of-home program manager at the Maryland Department of Human Services.
Maryland is tackling such pain points with a new “family-finding” platform that launched in September and serves as an assistive tool for caseworkers responsible for placing children needing out-of-home care, she said. The platform is particularly helpful for staff to search for kin-based caregivers — such as one of their direct family members, relatives or friends — which are preferred to placing a child with guardians they may not know personally.
To date, the platform has enabled DHS staff to find more than 41,000 potential or confirmed kin connections for children and adolescents in need of out-of-home care, Lowther said. That total is up from approximately 4,300 potential connections made through the platform within the first five months since its launch.
The tool uses public and proprietary databases that enable caseworkers to search for potential kin caregivers connected to the child based on available contact information, reducing the time it could take to place a child in care from hours to minutes, Lowther explained. She noted that a local agency within the state reported that the platform helped save staff approximately 10 hours of administrative work.
Now, staff can focus on more high-priority work, such as conducting more visitations to help familiarize children with their kin caregivers, helping caregivers prepare their homes for the child to move in and connecting children with supportive services like mental health programs or school classes, she explained.
“It's more time actually working towards the permanency for that youth …. because our goal is always to not have youth in out-of-home care,” Lowther said.
By streamlining and expediting a child’s placement with a kin guardian, Maryland leaders hope to see improved outcomes for youth entering and leaving the child welfare system, she said. For example, current research suggests that kinship care for displaced children can offer more stable conditions that support the youth’s safety and well-being, and that approach also helps reduce system costs compared with other foster care options.
Such outcomes are a growing priority for government leaders nationwide, but many state child welfare systems are struggling to keep up with increasing demands and pressure to deliver services, according to a report released last month by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Since 2016, federal and state government spending on child welfare modernization has exceeded $2 billion under the Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System — the federal regulatory framework for how states design and operate child welfare infrastructure, according to the report.
HHS also notes that, over the last decade, states have worked on 75 child welfare modernization projects, but only 23 of them have since become operational. Fifteen states have also not declared any new projects under the CCWIS.
“CCWIS implementation remains slow and uneven, with most resources flowing to legacy systems rather than modernization,” the report reads. Such implementation results in states’ continued reliance on legacy systems that limit data equity, restrict interoperability and increase caseworker burden. Those limitations threaten the timely delivery of child welfare services, child safety and placement stability, according to the report.