At a Glance
- 10,000+ families served per day through participating providers
- 52,000+ managed service reports captured digitally and counting
- Modern web-based platform replacing time-consuming, paper-based processes
- Built with secure, HIPAA-compliant architecture and strong product accessibility
The Brief
Across Washington State, thousands of children are placed in foster care or other out-of-home settings each year. Social workers and service providers coordinate visits, track services, and make high-stakes recommendations about family reunification and long-term safety.
Until this project, most of that work lived in paper files and email: visitation logs, case notes, and reports stored in manila folders and filing cabinets. It was difficult and time-consuming to answer basic questions like:
- Which services has a child actually received?
- How reliably are parents and children showing up for visits?
- Are we moving toward reunification, or toward terminating parental rights?
Partners for Our Children and the University of Washington saw an opportunity to use technology to make service providers’ lives easier and to generate more reliable data for case decisions and system-wide policy, without losing the human connection at the center of the work.
Scope
Substantial was asked to:
- Convert a paper- and email-driven system into a digital platform that social workers and providers would actually use in the field.
- Shape a clear product vision that would resonate with funders and align partners at the nonprofit, the university, state agencies, and private providers.
- Reduce duplicate data entry, simplify complex forms, and improve reporting and compliance across child welfare, foster care, and homelessness services.
- Meet strict privacy, security, and accessibility requirements for highly sensitive data and a wide range of user abilities.
Our Approach
We partnered across nonprofits, universities, state agencies, and frontline providers to design, prototype, and build a secure, user-centered platform, grounded in real workflows, careful change management, and rigorous attention to privacy and accessibility.
Grounded, human-centered research:
- Spent extensive time in the field with social workers, supervised-visit providers, and foster families across the state.
- Listened to front-line staff who often said no one had ever asked them how their tools could be better, and who felt overlooked by technology.
- Used those conversations to anchor product decisions in real daily workflows.
Product strategy and iterative design:
- Worked with Partners for Our Children, university experts, and social-service leaders to define the product strategy and roadmap.
- Created and tested a series of clickable prototypes to balance:
- Different local workflows and terminology
- The need for a consistent, statewide approach to data and reporting
- Used a collaborative stance with providers:
“We understand how you do this today. Do you think it could work like this instead?”
Then let them try the new approach and shape it through feedback, rather than imposing change.
Building a secure, accessible web platform
- Designed and developed a suite of web-based tools to replace paper forms and scattered spreadsheets.
- Focused on:
- Easy-to-use forms for visits, services, and case notes
- Role-appropriate views for caseworkers, providers, and administrators
- Dashboards showing the trajectory of a case; for example, how often parents and children attended scheduled visits, so staff could walk into court with clear data instead of piles of paper.
- Implemented strong HIPAA-aligned security and data-handling practices and prioritized product accessibility, including support for screen readers and multiple languages, to ensure that no user group was left behind.
Managing rollout, adoption, and handoff
- Rolled out the platform provider by provider across Washington, with on-site training and close support.
- Helped coordinate communication and decision-making across:
- Partners for Our Children
- University of Washington teams
- State child-welfare leaders
- Front-line service providers
- Supported a multi-year journey that ended in a successful handoff of the platform into state ownership, ensuring long-term sustainability.
The Results
- Replaced a fragmented paper system with a single digital platform that now supports child and family service providers across Washington.
- Enabled providers to serve more than 10,000 families per day through the platform, with over 52,000 service reports captured and managed digitally in the early years of deployment.
- Gave social workers and service providers faster, more reliable visibility into each case, turning hours of manual compilation into a few minutes on a dashboard.
- Helped ensure that privacy, security, and accessibility were treated as first-class requirements, not afterthoughts, in an environment with highly sensitive data and a wide spectrum of user abilities.
- Demonstrated that, with the right process and support, even tech-skeptical professionals doing emotionally demanding work can adopt new tools that genuinely make their jobs easier, and improve outcomes for children and families.
