Policy & Practice | Fall 2026

technology speaks

By Marty Elisco

Unlocking the Unstructured: How Narrative Analytics Is Completing the Promise of Data-Driven Child Welfare

F our siblings were facing separation. After serious safety concerns required their removal from their parents’ care, a Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (MA DCF) child welfare team was confronted with a familiar, but urgent, challenge: find a safe placement that would allow the children to remain together and maintain critical family connections. The information needed to solve the problem existed somewhere within the case history. The challenge was finding it. Using Augintel’s narrative search capabilities, within minutes, the team analyzed years of case documentation to identify extended family connec tions that would have been difficult to uncover through traditional case management document reviews. Staff made more than two dozen phone calls, including international outreach, and even located the maternal grandmoth er’s boyfriend through information Augintel surfaced in the case record. Those conversations ultimately led the team to an aunt, also living in Massachusetts, who was willing to open her home to all four children. The result was transformative. The siblings remained together, stayed in their school district, and were placed with family rather than being sepa rated into multiple foster homes. Years later, the children continue to thrive in the same placement. The story illustrates a reality that child welfare professionals understand well: some of the most important infor mation about children and families exists in narrative case documentation,

The Architecture Problem Beneath the Data Problem For more than four decades, federal policymakers have encouraged child welfare agencies to strengthen their use of data. The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 estab lished requirements for statewide information systems to support over sight of foster care and permanency outcomes. SACWIS investments

not in structured data fields. Family connections, emerging risks, housing concerns, service needs, cultural affili ations, and critical context are often buried within thousands of pages of case notes, assessments, contact sum maries, and reports. For decades, child welfare agencies have invested heavily in becoming more data driven. Yet much of the information most relevant to practice has remained effectively invisible.

Illustration by Chris Campbell

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