Speakers
- Thea Ramirez, Founder and CEO, Adoption Share—A technology nonprofit helping states to reduce barriers to adoption through their Family-Match application, which predictive analytics to match children with their forever families.
- Jamia McDonald, Public Sector Strategy and Operations at Deloitte—Expert consultants assisting states in building predictive models to monitor workload efficiency, understanding staffing needs, analyzing bottlenecks, and automation for improved delivery of social services programs.
Summary
Adoption Share
- Family-Match utilizes technology to identify appropriate connections between child and adoptive families. By bridging technology and the agency worker’s clinical skills, scientific attributes provide predictive pairings between the child and family.
- Technology is the driving force of innovation and reform in health and human services; by employing efficient and cost-effective data and methodologies, enhanced outcomes for individuals and families can be realized faster and on a larger scale.
Deloitte
- In preparation for the unwinding PHE, Deloitte has assisted states in building predictive models to monitor workload efficiency, understanding staffing needs, analyzing bottlenecks, and automation.
- The unwinding PHE has the potential to create service and support disruptions for individuals; predictive analytics are helping states bridge and prevent the service gap by creating warm hand offs for clients that will be impacted by the decrease in FMAP.
- ARPA funds allow states to explore improvements to program integrity through enhanced oversight and program analytics:
- Opportunities to leverage ARP funds include technology investments, evaluating complex policies to support staff, implementation of automation to lower error rates in benefits applications, and streamline processes.
Key Takeaways
Adoption Share
- There are children in US foster care systems who are eligible for adoption and do not have a family identified to adopt them. Prospective adoptive families outnumber children who are waiting to be adopted by a ratio of 5:1. It’s not scarcity and lack of families, it’s a breakdown in connection between children and eligible families. “It’s a connection problem”.
- In July 2018 Adoption Share matched 700+ children, placed 450+ children in pre-adoptive homes, and finalized 310+ adoptions. Florida forecasts potential savings of $38million over a span of 8 years.
- 3 Core Principles for Program Success:
- Inverse the Outreach: Focus on finding the best family for a child’s needs.
- Visibility is Key: Build out a centralized repository of families to allow workers to access a broader pool of candidates quickly.
- Leverage the Data: We gather data from families and children and use to make the best possible matches beyond the family’s preference.
Deloitte
- Administrative dollars in SNAP are where states have been innovating the most to drive change. States have focused on addressing structural issues through Self-Serve portals, expanding capacity, automation, training for service delivery, and outreach to vulnerable populations.
- In Pennsylvania – DHS caseworkers received a high volume of calls regarding Pandemic EBT eligibility, creating a significant backlog for processing eligibility.
- Office of Income Maintenance (OIM) developed a call center to triage the volume of calls.
- OIM also developed a robotic process automation (RPA) bot to compliment the caseworker’s intake capacity, which cleared the backlog and reallocated 2 dozen FTEs. In Kentucky– Kentucky “KyNet Benefits” consolidates existing communication tools increasing resident engagement and program efficiency.
Resources
- Session Presentations
- Family Match: Slidedeck | Info Sheet
