Evaluating an Innovative Information-Sharing Technology in Child Welfare: A Community-Based System Dynamics Approach

Background: Communication challenges between parties in child welfare cases are common and can lead to information "falling through the cracks" in ways that impact families. One Southeastern state's child welfare agency recently developed an online portal that leverages data linkages to provide enhanced information access and communication to agency personnel, parents, foster parents, and guardians ad litem. However, these sorts of technologies often face barriers to implementation due to the demanding, interprofessional, and interconnected nature of work within the child welfare system. To understand the tool’s integration into the complexity of real-world practice environments, this study used community-based system dynamics methods to (1) evaluate initial user impressions, (2) develop theories of change for how it could impact key outcomes, and (3) determine the conditions and strategies needed to maximize its potential impacts.

Methods: Individual interviews and group model-building sessions were conducted with a total of 36 caseworkers, supervisors, CASA representatives, foster parents, and agency leaders. Group model-building scripts elicited participants' opinions and impressions regarding the usability of the application, as well as their understanding of communication and information-sharing challenges within the state's child welfare system that shaped the intervention context. The research team conducted a thematic analysis of all transcripts, mapped the causal system structures that framed the outcomes and contexts for innovation, and refined results through feedback sessions with participant groups.

Results: Overall, state personnel and community partners found the tool to be useful as a user-friendly data repository to communicate substantive case information. However, collective use among community partners remained markedly low, and professionals repeatedly mentioned that the application could only be helpful to daily work if activity and use were consistent and meaningful across all groups. Notable barriers to adoption included "platform fatigue" in which participants found it difficult to add yet another technological system into their workflow, but participants noted many key comparative advantages that adoption could provide. Participants identified four key outcomes that could be impacted by robust and consistent application use: decreased time to permanency as collaboration, partner engagement, and service quality improve; reduced turnover among all system roles as administrative burden and conflict are lessened; greater child safety and well-being as the quality of communication and comprehensive needs assessment increases; and greater data transparency as more accurate and timely uploading and sharing of information takes place. Key conditions for impact included meaningful and widespread collective use of the application and locally-driven collaborative efforts to define how the technology could be incorporated into daily practice.

Implications: Such applications could constitute promising practice innovations that effectively leverage data linkage and communication technologies. Future research should investigate the impacts of these tools on case outcomes. However, because the application encountered significant barriers to adoption, researchers and policymakers should also seek to understand the role of localized implementation strategies, technology champions, user- and geographical-level acceptability differences, and data-driven engagement efforts to establish best practices for the implementation of technology in this context.