Inside Illinois’ journey to build a centralized platform for child welfare services

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A digital transformation among six child welfare agencies in Illinois is helping to break down silos and connect families with the mental and behavioral health services they need.

Policymakers across the nation have become increasingly concerned about a youth mental health crisis, as the proportion of children and adolescents experiencing anxiety and depression has climbed in recent years. 

Data from the National Survey of Children's Health released in April showed that, in 2016, 7.1% of young people reported having anxiety, which increased to 10.6% in 2022. The survey, which included 21,599 to 54,103 participants each year, also found that 3.2% of respondents said they felt depressed in 2016, and 4.6% said the same in 2022. 

Young people’s mental and behavioral health needs, some experts say, were worsened by factors like the COVID-19 pandemic and exorbitant social media use. Another major issue facing families looking to link their children with the care they need is that available resources are not keeping up with the demand for them. 

In Illinois, officials have embarked on a yearslong initiative to address such concerns and resource gaps with a centralized portal to help families access mental and behavioral services earlier this year. 

Publicly launched in January, the Behavioral Health Care and Ongoing Navigation, or BEACON, system streamlines child welfare resources across six state agencies: the Department of Human Services, the Department of Healthcare and Family Services, the Department of Children and Family Services, the Department of Juvenile Justice, the Department of Public Health and the Illinois State Board of Education. 

“This transformation initiative began in 2022 because … we had higher rates than ever [of] young people with depression and anxiety and other types of mental health challenges, and we had a depleted workforce,” said Dana Weiner, chief of the state’s Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative, during a breakout session at the American Public Human Services Association’s National Human Services Summit in Philadelphia last week

“This was most visible in the context of kids who were in the hospital for psychiatric reasons, who were ready for discharge, who were sitting waiting … because they couldn't get to a residential treatment bed or a transitional setting, or they couldn't go home because their family didn't have adequate community-based supports,” she explained. 

Prior to 2022, the six agencies operated on siloed systems that presented legal and technical barriers to sharing information about children and their families that could help resolve cases more efficiently, she explained.

Now, she said, BEACON serves as a streamlined “routing application” that “gets everybody where they need to go.” 

Agency staff can access the platform to share case information, manage and track individual cases and support interagency communication and task assignments to provide continued and holistic care to children. Using the portal, for instance, child welfare employees can more efficiently request the appropriate authority to enroll a child in Medicaid or check on a child’s individualized education program, Weiner said. 

What helped foster interagency collaboration was the creation of a universal consent form for parents to sign before accepting help and services from the child welfare system, instead of trying to reign in six separate agencies to develop a memorandum of understanding for sharing case-related data, she said. It helped accelerate the process of developing BEACON and providing support to those in need, she explained.  

Data on cases, such as the number of children awaiting mental health assistance, is also shared to a set of real-time dashboards to help officials monitor service delivery and identify roadblocks for families trying to access services, Weiner said. The dashboards ultimately track the state’s ability to respond to residents’ needs. 

Parents and caregivers using BEACON can create accounts to contact agency representatives and case navigators for support, upload and store documents for their children and track progress on their children’s cases. About 400 to 500 families access the BEACON site every day, she said. 

When creating an account, for instance, parents can opt to share information about their child’s mental and behavioral health, which can help direct them to specific community-based resources or state-funded programs they are eligible for and set them on the appropriate service pathways. The platform, and any information stored in it, is encrypted to ensure families’ data is private, Weiner said. 

BEACON’s development was announced last year, before its internal launch among certain state employees in August 2024. It went live to the public this year, after a two-year period during which the state agencies leveraged an internal tool similar to BEACON. 

The “rudimentary care portal” helped officials determine the specifications for the final product, Weiner said. Feedback from families, for instance, showed that they wanted a centralized system to reduce confusion about how and where to access child welfare resources and services across the six departments.

The early version of the tool also helped state agencies “demonstrate not only the need for this tool, but what the potential impact could be,” she said. 

Data collected during the practice period, for instance, showed that the portal helped staff address 444 cases, resolving roughly 75% of them. In 187 of those cases, the Department of Children and Family Services was contacted and successfully diverted a child from state custody to an alternative service pathway that “wouldn’t have been visible before we connected all the pieces of our [child welfare] system,” Weiner said. 

With those insights and the two years of experience using the state’s system, it only took about seven months to build the official BEACON platform in partnership with Google Public Sector, she said. 

The groundwork the state put in to develop BEACON speaks to the “spirit” of child welfare services in the state, “which is to empower families to have control of their own information, and … unlock all of the resources that are available by providing access” to them,” Weiner said.

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