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Category: Return on Investment

By Dr. Jeffrey Krukar, Licensed Psychologist/Certified School Psychologist, Genesee Lake School In our last post, we offered an example of how members of the Wisconsin Association of Family & Children’s Agencies used the EDGE curriculum to advance best practice performance measurement among a group of private child welfare service providers. In this post, we focus on the work of one of those organizations. Here, guest contributor Dr. Jeffrey Krukar describes how he is applying lessons learned in EDGE to improve the way his agency, Genesee Lake School, uses evidence to drive the process of improvement. In her description of WAFCA’s work, Emily Coddington wrote, “WAFCA members are strong believers in the concept that once you know better, you must do better.” GLS’s efforts post-participation in EDGE exemplify this commitment. Inspired to do better, GLS leaders have invested time, resources, and staff to ensure their performance measures are valid, reliable, and… Read more >

January 23, 2018
Under Six Minutes
The Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, the University of Chicago’s Departments of Medicine & Public Health Sciences, and the Center for State Child Welfare Data at Chapin Hall are field-testing computerized adaptive mental health tests (CAT-MH™) to diagnose and report on the mental health of young people in the child welfare system. ... Read more >
In 2013, the Data Center collaborated on a project examining patterns of healthcare needs and Medicaid expenditures for children in foster care in New York State. Read more about the findings and their implications for the state's transition from a fee-for-service health care system to managed care. ... Read more >

Today, public child welfare agencies are taking stock of their capacity for Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) and considering the investments they will make in order to build that capacity. How these CQI systems develop will vary from agency to agency depending on administrative structure, staffing patterns, available resources, and a host of other factors. They will all, however, be responsible for facilitating the same basic CQI process—a cycle of problem solving activities that requires the deliberate use of evidence. Given that shared responsibility, the child welfare field will benefit from a common vocabulary for describing what CQI is, the core principles on which CQI rests, and the critical role that evidence plays throughout the CQI process. In keeping with a century-long tradition of CQI that has guided improvement efforts in other fields, we put forth a common language for child welfare CQI in a new publication, Principles, Language, and Shared… Read more >

Care days is a strategic quantity that lies at the core of planning for, implementing, and monitoring foster care interventions, especially in the context of a Title IV-E waiver. This post summarizes Fred Wulczyn’s January 24, 2014 webinar “Care Days, Waivers, CQI, and Intervention Design.” ... Read more >
In this the second installment of a multipart series on care days and Title IV-E waivers, Fred Wulczyn will demonstrate how Chapin Hall's predictive analytics software, OSPEDALE, provides information that can help states plan for, manage, and monitor the use of waiver funds.... Read more >

Length or stay is a key indicator of permanency for children in foster care. For the sake of child well-being, we strive to minimize length of stay—to get children out of foster care and into permanent homes as quickly as possible. But length of stay also as a fiscal implication. Foster care is expensive to provide. Many states are exploring ways to reduce foster care expenditures and reinvest savings into preventive and in-home services that decrease the need for out-of-home care. In the previous Recipe, I used the web tool’s Baseline Care Days and Exits Summary to answer the question of whether interventions designed to improve permanency outcomes have their intended effects. In this Recipe, I’ll show you how to use the information produced by that template to set baselines and targets for expenditures as well as outcomes. This Recipe takes about 10 minutes to complete. In addition to the web tool,… Read more >