Cross-System Coordination As a Child Welfare Intervention

The field of child welfare is pushing for more and better use of evidence to both identify the needs of children and their families and assess the impact of services delivered. Unfortunately, the data which would provide the needed empirical foundation for this work are collected in different service systems, falling under the authority of distinct agencies. As such, the acquisition and use of data to generate evidence increasingly requires intentional coordination across systems. Each of these systems evolved separately, developing its own goals, data systems, regulations, and bureaucratic procedures. It is hard to work across systems, yet we must.

In this roundtable, discussants will conceptualize cross-system coordination as a proximal outcome to improved child and family well-being. For the purposes of this discussion, we define cross-system coordination as the timely and accurate identification of service needs for children reported for maltreatment regardless of the public system in which that information is collected. Specifically, discussants will facilitate a conversation about several inputs required to achieve cross-system coordination: (1) sequenced implementation tasks, (2) data linkages and interoperability, and (3) evidence use training for staff.

On the subject of implementation, discussants will: (1) outline cross-system coordination challenges in the context of a federal demonstration project for homeless, child welfare-involved families, (2) explain child mental health care coordination using an implementation science framework and organizational theory, and (3) offer a new framework for treating cross-system coordination as an intervention itself – one requiring sequenced, measurable implementation tasks.

Cross-system coordination requires cross-system data. Building the evidence needed to develop relevant and responsive policies, make smart program investments, and target services to achieve the greatest impact requires information that reflects clients’ experiences across systems and over time. A discussant will describe how one a data linkage project is partnering with public sector agencies to promote cross-sector data integration and, in turn, the ability to answer critical questions about how a child’s experiences with various systems impact their trajectories and outcomes. The purpose is not only to identify and serve children across systems, but also to measure the effectiveness of those efforts.

Evidence generated from cross-system data is only useful if policymakers and practitioners use it to drive decisions about work with children and families. Training can build staff’s skills for generating, acquiring, processing, and applying evidence to decision making. The theory behind training is that trained staff will become better consumers and users of evidence; that this improved skill will help them make more evidence-based decisions about how to work with clients; and that implementing those decisions will lead to improved outcomes for children. A discussant will describe various approaches to evidence use training and strategies for measuring whether training has the intended effects.

Together, the discussants aim to demonstrate that coordinating across child-serving systems, like any other intervention requires deliberate, measurable action steps - implementation, data collection, and evidence use.