Welfare Watch - June 18, 2010 - Electronic Records Certification, What does it have to do with Child Welfare?

There are 2.5 million children living in Georgia.  Georgia child caring systems touches the lives of thousands of children each day.  A little over 95% of Georgia's children attend pubic schools.  41% of all Georgia's children are covered by Medicaid, Georgia's health insurance for the poor.  Tens of  thousands more are touched by our child protective and juvenile justice systems.  The Division of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities have identified more than 12,000 children that need mental health services.  Different State Departments touch many children, in most cases they touch the lives of the same children, yet there is no means by which they share data and therefore work together. 

At the national level, this fragmentation has been identified as a major barrier to effective and efficient services in health care.  Paper records still rule in much of the health care arena.  Poor outcomes, costly duplication of services and ineffective treatments often result. 

Today the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology issued a final rule to establish a temporary certification program for electronic health record (EHR) technology.  This certification is used to provide assurance and confidence that a product or service will work as expected and will include the capabilities for which it was purchased.   Technology vendors are being required to be in conformity with whatever is developed for health care information technology and will be in conformity with each other. 

Nothing exists  like this now in the child welfare sector.  The closest thing that we have in Georgia is the Federally funded Shines System.  Georgia SHINES is a web-based, statewide automated child welfare information system (SACWIS) that offers case managers with the Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) a comprehensive tool for helping children and families.  DJJ has something different for their children and parole officers and DMHDD has another tool for its mental health specialists.  None "talk" to each other and as a result, information is not shared and in most cases, work is not coordinated.  Duplication of data entry, case management and work makes for inefficiencies and many times ineffective services to children and their families. 

Data can drive the work. We have seen this very clearly within DHS.  Georgia needs to take a closer look at its duplicative data collection systems and strategize about how we can make these systems work together. In the process, we just might learn how these care systems can work more effectively together.     

For more information about the temporary certification for Health Information Technology program and rule, please visit http://healthit.hhs.gov/certification.

For more information about other HHS Recovery Act Health Information Technology funding and programs, see http://www.hhs.gov/recovery/programs/index.html#Health.

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Welfare Watch, an email newsletter of the
Georgia Association of Homes
and Services for Children
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http://www.gahsc.org
Normer Adams, Editor
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