Policy & Practice | Fall 2024

partnering for impact

By Jim Daugherty and Julie Barbosa

One Year with Artificial Intelligence: What the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services Learned About Natural Language Processing

R oughly one year ago, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (IL DCFS) became one of the first child welfare organizations in the United States to recognize the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) in sup porting child welfare staff. We selected Augintel as our vendor and completed a state-wide rollout of the AI capability of natural language processing (NLP) to more than 6,000 child welfare staff and child welfare–contributing agencies across the state. Similar to the majority of state child welfare orga nizations across the country, IL DCFS was looking to modernize and stream line operations and take advantage of

advances in technology to truly support child welfare practice. We realized, early in our mod ernization journey, accessing the unstructured data in case notes was one key to achieving this goal. We knew that caseworkers were spending too much time combing through nar rative data to understand the story of the family and think through potential courses of action. We knew that the ability to read, summarize, and present information in the notes would save child welfare teams valuable time and give them a complete view of the family’s story on which to base their decisions. The time traditionally spent

clicking through and reviewing case notes could be better spent in any number of ways, such as spending more time with families. In a survey earlier this year, staff confirmed that our objectives for adopting NLP are being met. A resounding 97 percent indicated that accessing the information in case notes is very important or critical to doing their jobs. And regular users reconfirmed earlier time savings estimates—they are saving up to 5 hours each week on tasks such as preparing for court, locating specific information such as medications, and identifying family members and fictive

Illustration by Chris Campbell

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Policy & Practice Fall 2024