Transforming child welfare case management

Enabling social workers to ensure child safety and family stability

Child welfare organizations across the United States face unprecedented challenges, and Idaho is no exception. Caseloads are rising, and every day, social workers must make decisions that affect child safety and family stability. At the same time, they must comply with national Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (CCWIS) standards, which were created to modernize child welfare systems and reduce the cost of maintaining them.

To respond to these challenges, Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) partnered with Deloitte to implement Ensuring Safety and Permanency in Idaho (ESPI), a CCWIS-compliant child welfare technology solution built on cloud-native Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

The department’s business goals for this engagement included:

• Managing cases and delivering services more efficiently
• Streamlining administrative processes
• Meeting CCWIS standards
• Improving the department’s effectiveness through data-driven decision-making

What happened next

The ESPI design leveraged existing Deloitte child welfare modules as well as child welfare best practices. This foundation made it feasible to configure a fully functioning child welfare solution that met the department’s needs from the outset.

Deloitte delivered the solution using an Agile methodology and a phased implementation approach, starting with intake and proceeding through other child welfare business processes—to support adoption by various user groups.

Human-centered design guided the configuration of the solution throughout the project. Technical architecture was built on FedRAMP-compliant government cloud and, in addition to Dynamics and Power Platform, used Microsoft Azure services.

Deloitte deployed ESPI in 24 months with three releases—on time and on budget. Following the final release and a month-long period of after-deployment support, DHW assumed responsibility for operations and maintenance, according to plan.

The wins

• Allowed Idaho DHW to provide a modern user experience—such as mobility and a caseworker portal—and a stable, scalable cloud platform
• Increased caseworker ability to focus on child well-being and family engagement
• Optimized ongoing total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Reduced implementation risk and supported a faster implementation timeline