|
 |
Informatics - What is it? Broadly defined, informatics is a field of study that focuses on research, development, and application of approaches for using data and technology to improve acquisition, storage, analysis and visualization of information.
Informatics - How is it used? Our focus, children's services informatics, is the systematic study of available information from children's services systems (child protection, foster care, juvenile court, adoption and guardianship) to understand how data is captured, retrieved, and used in child welfare decisions and how computational tools and methods are applied to manage the information for improved decision-making.
CFRC, as a leader and innovator in this emerging field, has in-depth experience with a wide variety of national child welfare datasets including NSCAW, AFCARS, and NCANDS. The Center's own data archives include longitudinal child welfare data that draw from a variety of sources: Illinois DCFS, CFRC projects and federal IV-E waiver demonstrations, survey data on child well-being in Illinois, and state specific AFCARS and NCANDS data.
Informatics Projects: Conditions of Children in or at Risk of Foster Care in Illinois [2006] An annual, comprehensive monitoring report that looks at safety, stability, continuity, legal permanence, and the well-being of children in foster care in Illinois. Click here to access the data associated with these indicators.
Foster Care Utilization Review Program (FCURP) The Center's Foster Care Utilization Review Program supports the Illinois child welfare community in the improvement of safety, permanence, and well-being outcomes for children and families in Illinois. The FCURP team provides project management, training and technical assistance to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and its private sector partners. As the Department prepares for its Second Round, federal Child and Family Service Review (CFSR), the FCURP team will assist DCFS in achieving the goals set forth in its Program Improvement Plan (PIP). Click on the following link to view project web pages and more information: Foster Care Utilization Review Program (FCURP).
Signs of Progress The Center, in conjunction with outside partners, developed software programs that link sequential federal AFCARS submissions, creating a longitudinal dataset. From these longitudinal datasets the Center is able to produce Signs of Progress reports for individual states. The reports provide side-by-side comparisons for states showing performance according to the federal measures and system performance as measured by the longitudinal data.
Fostering Court Improvement Fostering Court Improvement is committed to provide every state in the nation a platform of shared data from which the Dependency Court and the Child Welfare Agency can manage systems expressly designed to improve outcomes for children and families. Fostering Court Improvement (FCI) combines expertise developed at the Barton Child Law and Policy Clinic at Emory University and the Children and Family Research Center in the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to convert existing data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) and the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) into reports that inform the core work of both dependency courts and child welfare agencies. FCI provides an efficient mechanism to share data that already exist within the states through reports specifically designed for facilitated discussions among local decision makers. This powerful web-based tool can be used to supplement and enhance existing data systems within the court and the child welfare agency. While there are many approaches to data collection, reporting and analysis, FCI chooses to use existing data, currently available in every state, as the starting point for a rich discussion of outcomes for children and families. Web-based data is accessible to individual states for looking at child welfare removals, foster care population and discharges. The rank-ordered data can be viewed as tables or graphs, and is broken out by county, child welfare regions, and judicial districts and circuits. Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, and Nebraska are currently part of the project. More detail about Fostering Court Improvement can be found at http://www.FosteringCourtImprovement.org.
| ||||
  |