In July 2023, the South Carolina Department of Children’s Advocacy's Foster Care Review Division launched a new software solution aimed at modernizing its management of foster care reviews.  Just a few months later, the agency was recognized nationally based on FCRD’s new system, winning the inaugural Hyland Customer Innovation Award for Environmental and Social Impact.
 
“We were delighted to hear that we had even been named a finalist, much less had won,” says FCRD Director Lindsey Taylor. “We know this new system will be a game-changer for our ability to review the cases of children in foster care, and this is a wonderful acknowledgement of our efforts to improve those outcomes.”
 
The award was presented on October 4 in front of more than 1,500 attendees at CommunityLIVE, Hyland’s annual corporate conference that provides informational and educational sessions for its customers and partners. 
 
The new case management system, called CAMS (short for Child Advocacy Management System), provides a central platform that significantly streamlines internal processes through better document management and workflow automations.  
 
Importantly, it will also integrate with the Department of Social Services’ case management system, eliminating the need for the duplicative manual entry of data previously required to prepare reports for each child’s review—a massive task considering the more than 3,600 children currently in foster care.
 
Built on Hyland’s OnBase platform, the new tool allows access to all aspects of a child’s case, from the case plan families must complete to sibling and family history to ongoing legal and familial case status.  This comprehensive system allows for a more holistic review and ultimately helps identify ways to advocate for children in foster care to achieve permanency more quickly.
 
“The goal of foster care review is to help children achieve permanency in a timely fashion.  Conducting thorough reviews and advocating for these children requires one thing—fast and easy access to all related case data pertaining to each child in one place,” says Taylor.  “And that was one thing we didn’t have with our previous system.”
 
CAMS will also provide another vital function that goes beyond individual case review: the ability to identify problems at a statewide level.  With 43 local review boards and more than 3,000 children to review, a staggering amount of data is produced. Prior to CAMS, discovering gaps in the system was a difficult and time-intensive process that could only be accomplished by manually combing through records.  
 
“The Department of Children’s Advocacy’s mission is to improve outcomes for children, and, pursuant to the agency’s enabling legislation, we examine the care and services that state agencies provide children on a system-wide basis and make recommendations to improve the quality of those services,” says DCA Executive Director and State Child Advocate Amanda Whittle.  “The Foster Care Review Division’s old database lacked the capability to identify systemic issues within the foster care system. CAMS was created to have the capacity to capture reportable data, which will provide the FCRD with relevant and reliable data to engage in intentional advocacy for permanency for children in foster care.”
 
While CAMS is still new, the process has been years in the making.  Whittle recognized the old system wasn’t working and requested funding for a new database system in September 2021.  That funding was approved for FY2023, and development of the tool began shortly afterward.
 
“Investing in this system was vital to promoting a broad vision of reform for a system of care grounded in urgency, empathy and sustainability,” says Whittle.  “CAMS will support continued collaboration with child wellbeing partners to communicate, coordinate, and implement strategies to improve the timeliness of court hearings and permanency outcomes for children.”
 
Taylor says her team is looking forward to seeing how the powerful new software will allow them to do their jobs more easily and successfully.
 
“We are excited to see all that CAMS can do to help us identify and eliminate the barriers to permanency so we can be better advocates for these children.”