Policy & Practice | Summer 2026

technology speaks

By Alex Stephany and Michael A. Becketts

Modernizing Human Services: How Fairfax County Is Leading the Way

A t a recent APHSA session on AI in human services, Alycia Blackwell, Fairfax County Department of Family Services deputy director, stood in front of the audience holding up a floppy disk. The crowd groaned in recogni tion as Alycia clicked through more relics: a first-generation flip phone, a stack of manila case files, overflowing notebooks. Every one of those objects marks a moment when an entire industry moved on. Floppy disks gave way to the cloud. Flip phones gave way to smart ones. No doctor is still reading an X-ray from a lightbox. No restaurant is running dinner service on paper tickets. So why is human services tech nology still stuck in the 20th century? The industry has been slower to catch up than most, and nowhere is that more true than in the laborious process of writing up a case note. Alycia’s point was simple. These outdated technologies are artifacts, along with manual case notes. Thankfully for her team, Fairfax County’s work with Beam over the past year has proved that ditching pen and paper is possible, and that the results can be transformative.

program. Yet documentation has silently dictated the shape of the job. Family safety practitioner Brahema Maluba described the reality before Beam Notes: “If I’m doing four visits a day, it’s going to take me another four hours to document those notes.” Foster care worker Sarah Conner described a cycle that ate her evenings and weekends: “I’d get up at 4 am to write so that by 8 am I’d have something on my supervisor’s desk. Or I’d stay up past midnight. It was bad.” A Data-Driven Pilot After clearing legal and data privacy review, the county piloted the Beam Notes tool from October to December 2025 with 40 Children, Youth, and Families staff. The results showed a 51 percent drop

in documentation time, 81 percent improved work-life balance, and 9/10 note quality rating. “Beam is a supple mental tool for us to just kind of do our work,” Blackwell said. “It is not a shadow case management system.” By January 2026, Fairfax expanded the use of Notes to roughly 100 more staff and into Adult Protective Services. Beam Notes freed up time for the Fairfax team but, more important, it enabled a stronger connection between caseworkers and the families in front of them. Berkley recalled a time when it was difficult to juggle notes, eye contact, and conversation while a client was sharing extremely difficult and sensi tive information. “Now, I have this tool. When the Notebook Disappears

Balancing Paperwork and People-Work

Ask a caseworker why they got into the field, and documentation is never the answer. “We’re in the field because we want that one-on-one client interac tion, building rapport, building trust,” said Sheemeca Berkley, a case manager in Fairfax’s Neighborhood Networks

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