P&P August 2015

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So how will Oliver improve lives? Let’s first look at the child welfare system: As part of a case plan created by a social worker, families are assigned different services to help bring their family back together. When a family is successfully reunited, it is impossible to know which of the services they received were the most effective—one service provider can never know for sure if it was their efforts or another service provider within the case plan that made the greatest impact on a family. If there was a solution that tracked services for all families interacting with the child welfare system, we could analyze the data and hone in on which services have the best outcomes and are most cost effective. We could also understand which services work best for different kinds of families. In addition, social service providers would also be able to identify how they might be able to improve their own services and workflows. In turn, the limited resources available can then be directed to the most effective services for each individual family, which would ultimately keep more families together. Aside from child welfare, there are also many other social service networks that can benefit from Oliver. In particular, the youth and young adult homeless service provider com- munities have very similar needs—and often see some of the same children who “graduate” from the child welfare system to homelessness. That’s why POC will first bring Oliver to child welfare and youth and young adult social service providers. In time, we hope to be able to expand to even more social service domains. While we are in the early phases of planning and development for Oliver but we are confident that this solution can improve social systems, which will ultimately improve lives. At the end of the day, that’s what really matters. Better Data and Technology Solution. Better Services. Better Outcomes for Vulnerable Children and Families in Our Communities.

there a particular strategy that isn’t working? How can we make certain workflows more efficient? Was the customer satisfied with the experience? These are the types of questions that are much harder to answer within social services. Even the greatest level of transparency couldn’t tell the full picture from start to finish. Social service providers just don’t have the tools or resources to do it. As such, the lack of data and technology becomes a major barrier to improving services for the most vulnerable children and At POC, we thought to ourselves: if we can empower social service pro- viders with innovative technology, tools, and powerful data, services will be enhanced, which ultimately means that outcomes for children and families will be improved. That’s why we’re taking what we learned from developing the Data Portal to create Oliver—a new tech- nology solution that will help social service providers streamline very time- consuming business processes within their organizations. Spending less time on pen-and-paper reports allows them to spend more face-to-face time with the clients they serve. We’ve met with more than 50 pro- viders in Washington State to get a better picture of how their business operates, so that we can develop a web-based solution that targets their needs. We’ve learned that some don’t even collect data, but for those that do, their service delivery management systems are often outdated, closed off from other partners working with the same clients, and do not have a feedback loop that allows them to assess how and if their services are working. Oliver will deliver on all of these resource gaps through a differ- entiated simple service management solution modeled after the e-commerce retail market and focused on enabling providers to deliver more personalized client care. families in our communities. BUILDING A SOLUTION FOR SOCIAL SERVICE PROVIDERS

data that provide a good landscape of Washington’s children welfare system, which is easily accessible through the Data Portal. Vice President of Branch Program Operations, Bethany Larsen, said of the portal, “we are still finding ways to utilize the Data Portal and we are grateful for the availability of the information.” Legislators and their staff are also looking to the Data Portal for quick, easy-to-access information about the child welfare system. They can also get this information directly from the agency, but having it a click away helps them get the right information when they need it—a critical advan- tage during busy, fast-paced legislative sessions. Ultimately, however, the data portal is only as good as the data that power it, and the system data collected today are sometimes incomplete and incor- rect, and therefore limited in what they can tell us. CHILD WELFARE DATA GAP Through our work with the Data Portal, we have learned that reporting child welfare data alone will never allow us to achieve the level of under- standing that will truly enable us to identify broader social service problems and solutions. We need new data and technology solutions in place upstream—starting with social service providers. These are the people and organizations the state contracts with to deliver services to children and families. Through conversations with these providers, it’s become abundantly clear that they need a solution to allow them to more efficiently collect high-quality data, better manage their workflow, and then analyze the data to see where improvements can be made—all of which are critical in order to improve their work and the system at large. Let’s put this into perspective: a major business doesn’t make decisions based on the final sales alone—they are constantly looking at the data, and making decisions and efficiencies along the way. What efforts worked best? Is

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