A replacement for the antiquated Child and Adult Protective System, which was implemented 20 years ago, was first scheduled to be completed this fall. But that was pushed back to next October after DPHHS, which runs the CFS, determined it needed to roll out a program with more functions than originally planned.
As the number of children who enter CFS annually has doubled over the last five years, the department has struggled to hire and keep employees who face increasingly high workloads, up to four times the amount recommended by national watchdog groups. Lowering the amount of time spent on data entry and struggling to navigate an out-of-date computer system could alleviate that.
CAPS is what the employees who answer the Child Abuse Hotline and specialists who do investigations or fieldwork use to input and manage cases. The new program is called Montana Family Safety Information System.
Erica Johnston, operations management officer for the department, said Wednesday that the first phase of the new program was initially planned to handle only the intake process. But the system that eventually rolls out will cover everything from intake to assigning a case for investigation, completing the investigation, reporting on work done, and documenting if a child is removed from a home.
“While it may feel like the project is delayed, it’s really about a broadening of what we included in Phase 1 and what we really thought we could have in the hands of workers,” she said.
Department spokesman Jon Ebelt said the first part of the project is over half complete.
The department is going from a system with a black background and green text that uses F keys to navigate to a Web-based program that is device-responsive, meaning it will adjust to fit on screens any size from a desktop to a smartphone, which CPS specialists are equipped with when they go out into the field.
The state's Information Technology Services Division, which is providing the development and graphic design in conjunction with the department, reached out to CFS employees about what they wanted in a new system. The old system was a struggle for an increasingly younger workforce to use.
“If you can just imagine being a professional that grew up in the age of technology with web-based services and instant gratification with information, coming into your career trying to learn a mainframe system, it's just not intuitive,” Johnston said.
One of the biggest challenges with CAPS was finding information about people related to a case, such as siblings. The new system will show all of that on one screen and tell employees about possible family relations they might not have known about.
“I can’t even come up with a word for how much better it is,” Johnston said.
The team working on the project couldn’t come up with an estimate of how much faster an employee will be able to enter case information, but Johnston said the change is incredibly valuable.
“It will be immeasurable, just in the ability to know and understand and quickly learn the system. While it may not reduce the time that a caseworker spends on a case, it’ll improve the allocation of time that worker spends on a case, and that's really the goal.”
The department plans to create an entirely new system over the next several years, but is doing it in a modular way to get a new tool out to workers as soon as possible, Johnston said.
Part of the reason for the delay is because the department thought it could use more pieces from the system the Department of Corrections uses to manage offender information. While that system provided the framework for what CFS will use, developers had to build more from scratch than expected.
It also took longer to get federal approval for the system, which must be built to regulations governing how it functions and what sort of information it collects.
Johnston said by January she’d have a better idea of when employees around the state would start testing the intake component. CFS offices statewide will test new components as they are ready.
During the 2013 legislative session, the department received $350,000 to research what it would take to replace the old CAPS system. It learned that a new system would be too expensive to buy from a vendor, so in 2015 the department instead chose to ask the Legislature for money to build its own version. The department received about $4 million. Of that, $750,000 goes to this project, which is matched by federal funds for $1.5 million. The state funding renews each biennium.
Johnston said the money is enough to support the department's work.
Later phases of the project will include pulling data out of the system to use to make better management decisions.
Getting information from CAPS is difficult and time-consuming. Numbers from CAPS were also dated, so supervisors couldn’t get a real-time picture of, for example, the number of calls for service or caseloads of employees. In later phases of the update, the new system will have a dashboard with programmed searches to more easily provide that type of information.
Johnston said as employees start testing the system, they might see things that need fixing or changed, which could push back the timeline, but added that with the level of involvement from employees so far, she doesn’t anticipate a lot of problems.
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