How Illinois is designing citizen-centric operations for better service

Illinois is on the path to improving its care of children through the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). It’s ripe for change and impact on children and families by providing better support to DCFS caseworkers and investigators who are the critical link. Illinois wants to be able to address difficult and (potentially) dangerous situations for children faster, and that also means making the caseworker and investigator access to data and insights about the situation and options easier. CIO plays a critical role in helping to define a citizen-centric network of data and relationships in meeting this goal.

At the recent Public Sector for the Future Summit hosted by Leadership for a Networked World at Harvard University, sponsored by Accenture, Hardik Bhatt, CIO, Illinois, shared the on-going journey for change in serving and creating better outcomes for the foster children, families, and caseworkers in Illinois. It’s a story of a “Digital OneOffice” being created — partnership between agencies in health and human services and the CIO to aggregate and digitize data, develop a 360-degree view of the people being served, and translate those insights into meaningful actions to help foster kids, parents, and caseworkers.

First and foremost, know your customer – in this case, the children

“We get so much data about the citizen and now we need to know the citizen,” explained Hardik Bhatt, CIO, State of Illinois. “We are working on how to restructure the government services and operations by using data and evidence to drive efficient, effective, and customer focused service delivery. We are working on how to know our customers – foster children, seniors, veterans, etc. – better, know their journey, and create supporting processes.”

When a child is in distress, the last thing the government wants to do is take the child out of the family environment. But before they can take action, they have to know who are the relatives, what is the relationship, and is the environment familiar and safe. Originally, an investigator would create a child’s profile by printing out and highlighting data on multiple forms from over 10 systems. It took days. Now a data sharing agreement allows a crawler to build the record from multiple systems in seconds, allowing the investigator to focus on the child and an action plan quickly. They get insight into the family relationships, support services (e.g., SNAP, TANF, Medicaid), and even weatherization information to understand the housing situation. Investigators can shift their attention from collecting data to working with data to help the children and families faster and more effectively. Additional support, such as a mobile app with GPS allows the investigators to capture on-site reviews and submit them within the 48-hour window required for updates. It all started with a shared focus on serving the consumer and impacting outcomes enabled a tough but valuable agreement between agencies for data sharing.  

“Banks know everything about their customers, and government agencies don’t. That’s the starting point for us,” said CIO Hardik Bhatt. Data was siloed in over 60 medium/major systems. To get started, they created innovation incubator to work across the government organizations to create a common framework of process, people, systems, and data. Essentially, to be interoperable.  A facilitator hosted 12 agencies (including K-12 education, Department of Corrections, and Juvenile Justice) and a technology leader to discuss problems and issues in the Health and Human Services. “In most of the country, 1 in 6 people are using Medicaid, but in Illinois, it is 1 in 4,” cited Hardik Bhatt, “so 25% depend on state aid. We need to share the challenges in serving this constituency and find more effective ways to serve them.” 

To set a standard for sharing, the group negotiated an agreement signed by every agency to share data upon request. If an agency requests data to service citizens, there is a 10-day window to respond. If the answer is no, there must be a policy or law referenced (e.g., CMS or HIPAA); escalations go to the CIO to review. The CIO is the data steward and the clearinghouse; it also anonymizes the data as needed for security and compliance. This agreement did not happen overnight; as you can imagine, it took time to work through the nuances. But the driving force is to better serve citizens –children, seniors, veterans, etc.—even beyond the current focus on foster families. The initiative consistently comes back to this point.

Be resourceful by tapping into partnerships for fresh insights and innovation

With a shared focus on the foster care constituency and the data sharing agreement, the department looked for resources to help address further issues. Government agencies do not have easy access to consulting resources for defining and driving change, but they can be very savvy with local partnerships. In this case, the innovation incubator tapped into the University of Illinois Design Institute. The question on the table: How might we strategize and built a peer-to-peer platform to support foster family connections while ensuring the privacy and security of foster youth?

A group of students, faculty, caseworkers, and investigators came together and is now in its third semester of work, putting the foster care family enablement at the center of all activity. In the first phase, they did research in the field, speaking with foster parents, kids, and institutions that provide services. They synthesized data and created the challenge question (noted above). Then, they hosted a hackathon where students came up with multiple solutions cover “connect with peers,” “connect with experts,” and “connect with agency.”  They will take the winning ideas and build prototypes with the Illinois IT department, which will pick it up at that point.  

Engaging the management team and broader workforce is critical to building momentum for impact on outcomes

“It is taking time to build momentum throughout our organization,” notes CIO Hardik Bhatt about this consumer-oriented cooperative approach to designing solutions. It’s a cultural shift, but many people work in government agencies because they want to help citizens have better lives, and this approach offers a connection between their work and the impact it has on their constituents. “We are looking to continue forward by using evidence and outcomes to draw in more people.” At a recent staff meeting, an employee remarked, “I was going to retire, but with the new government, one year in, I don’t want to retire because I’m enjoying this work.”

This work has put Illinois on a path to a citizen-centric, data-driven government

The initiatives in Illinois started by putting the citizen at the center of all efforts – “Person 360.” To get this well-rounded picture, agencies worked through the “eMOU” to simplify cross-agency data sharing. Now, they are thinking about what else could they do with these fuller and easier pictures of constituents, and how to engage more of the public sector workforce and local companies. A more informal mentoring partnership has emerged between leaders in local companies with significant operations in Illinois and the agencies, covering topics including security and data management. This ecosystem will be critical to driving long-term change and impact. 

Illinois has already seen impact from these efforts as the Center for Digital Government recognized in 2016 that the state was most improved for use of technology and innovation, having moved from the bottom quarter to the top third of all 50 states.[1]  The data, digital technology, and relationships are all critical elements in the framework for better serving the citizen through government operations. What ties it all together and gives the initiatives real value – and power for change – is the shared focus on improving the health and welfare outcomes of the people the government serves.

[1] https://www.illinois.gov/IISNews/16-0715-DoIT_Technology_Rating.pdf