Policy & Practice October 2017

locally speaking

By Erin Dalton

Using Data to Improve ChildWelfare Decision-Making

I n August 2016, the Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS) implemented the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST), a pre- dictive risk modeling tool designed to improve child welfare call screening decisions. The AFST was the result of a two-year process of exploration and community engagement about how existing data could be used to improve decision-making at the time of a child welfare referral. When receiving a child abuse or neglect referral, call screeners (who receive approximately 15,000 calls each year) must make important deci- sions about whether to “screen in” and investigate the case or “screen out” and offer community services. These decisions often must be made with minimal information. An analysis of prior cases found that 27 percent of our highest risk cases had been screened out, while 48 percent of the lowest risk cases had been screened in and investigated. The case was clear—a predictive risk model could provide additional infor- mation to help workers make these important decisions. In 2014, after a competitive process, we selected a team from Auckland University of Technology, the University of Southern California, and the University of California–Irvine to develop a tool to leverage the more than one billion records contained in DHS’s Data Warehouse. The result of this partnership is the AFST, an analytics tool that synthesizes data to predict the likelihood of future refer- rals and/or out-of-home placements over the next two years. The AFST is designed to inte- grate and analyze hundreds of data elements—such as previous child

welfare involvement or past criminal justice involvement—on each person added to a referral to generate an overall Family Screening Score that falls between 1 and 20. The higher the score, the greater the chance for a future event (e.g., re-referral, place- ment), according to the model. The score provides additional information to assist call screeners with deter- mining whether or not the call should be screened in. The AFST does not replace clinical judgment, but provides additional support during the decision- making process. “We recognized that such a tool could cause concern in the commu- nity, and we wanted to address that at

the beginning,” said Katie Arvay, an analyst in DHS’s Office of Children, Youth and Families. “We held several community and stakeholder meetings to gather input during the exploration and development process. All feedback and suggestions were considered, and this input helped us to develop the final product.” In addition to gathering community feedback, the AFST underwent an ethical review. In summarizing their results, the experts concluded that “… the implementation of the AFST is ethi- cally appropriate. Indeed, we believe that there are significant ethical issues

See Allegheny County on page 35

Illustration by Chris Campbell

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October 2017 Policy&Practice