Child Welfare Case Management

Part of the worlds-biggest-software-project initiative.

An open, AI-native case management platform for child protective services, foster care, and family support agencies — unifying case tracking, placement management, and court coordination in a single auditable system.

Child welfare agencies carry one of the highest-stakes mandates in human services: protecting vulnerable children while supporting safe family reunification. This project aims to provide a modern, CCWIS-aligned platform that gives caseworkers a real-time, unified view of each child's situation, supports inter-agency and court-ordered workflows, and reduces administrative burden so staff can focus on direct service.

Why Child Welfare Case Management?

Incumbent platforms like IBM Cúram and Oracle CX for Child Welfare carry enterprise-grade cost and 18–36 month implementation timelines, putting them out of reach for smaller, tribal, rural, and international agencies.
Legacy SACWIS deployments and tools like extendedReach and FAMCare offer limited AI/ML or predictive analytics, while AI features in newer entrants (Binti) raise unresolved data privacy concerns around PII in transcription workflows.
No open-source child welfare case management platform with meaningful market presence currently exists — every solution analysed is proprietary commercial software.
Federal reporting (AFCARS, NYTD, NCANDS) and CCWIS compliance are mandatory but unevenly supported; tools like Bonterra Apricot 360 require customisation to meet them.
Cross-agency interoperability with courts, Medicaid, schools, juvenile justice, and tribal authorities remains fragmented, and family/youth voice in case records is largely absent.

Key Features

Case Intake, Assessment & Planning

Referral intake with structured decision-making (SDM) safety and risk assessment tools
Priority classification and assignment to caseworkers
Case plans with goals, tasks, timelines, and progress notes
Safety plans and family team meeting documentation
Supervisor review workflow at intake

Placement & Family Network Management

Foster home matching and placement recording with placement history
Searchable foster home database with filtering by location, age/gender preferences, vacancy, and service type
Licensing status tracking and bed availability
Sibling placement coordination
Family relationship mapping and kin-finding workflows

Court, Compliance & Federal Reporting

Court date tracking, legal documents, hearing outcomes, and permanency timeline compliance
AFCARS, NYTD, and NCANDS data collection and submission
State-specific SACWIS / CCWIS compliance support
Compliance checklists with auto-calculated due dates
Role-based access control with audit trails

Multi-Agency Collaboration & Document Management

Role-based portals for courts, guardians ad litem, schools, healthcare providers, and foster carers
Secure document storage for photos, assessments, court orders, medical records, and correspondence
E-signature support, including remote signature collection
Cross-agency referral and service tracking
Family-facing portal for secure communication and document submission

Field Work & Caseworker Productivity

Mobile-responsive interface for home visits and field documentation
Personalised dashboards showing workload and upcoming compliance items
Configurable workflows and forms without custom code
Appointment scheduling with calendar integration
Workload management and capacity-based task assignment

AI-Native Advantage

AI features are designed to reduce caseworker administrative burden while remaining auditable and PII-safe. Capabilities include case note summarisation and structured data extraction from free-text narratives, meeting transcription with auto-population of forms, ML-driven placement matching using child and family characteristics, multilingual translation for client-facing interfaces, and anomaly detection for federal reporting data quality. Risk scoring is delivered with explainable, auditable outputs to address the bias and transparency concerns raised by opaque predictive tools currently in the market.

Tech Stack & Deployment

The platform follows the CCWIS standard's modular, API-first architecture so it can act as a full SACWIS replacement or as an augmentation layer over legacy systems. Deployment supports cloud, on-premise, and hybrid modes, with multi-tenancy and configuration flexibility for jurisdictions with differing policy rules and form sets. Interoperability is built around RESTful APIs, HL7 FHIR for health data, and state-specific data exchange frameworks for courts, Medicaid, housing, mental health, and tribal authorities. Offline capability for field workers and high-availability infrastructure for agency offices are first-class concerns, with HIPAA-compliant storage, role-based access controls, and detailed audit logging throughout.

Market Context

The child welfare case management market is served entirely by proprietary commercial software, ranging from accessible SaaS (Noble Child from $25/user/month) through purpose-built systems (Casebook, Binti, extendedReach, FAMCare) to enterprise platforms (IBM Cúram, Oracle CX). Binti alone serves 550+ agencies across 36 US states with 12 statewide systems, and Eccovia ClientTrack reports 1,200+ government and private agency customers. Primary buyers are US state and county child protective services departments, foster care and adoption agencies, and non-profit family-support organisations, with significant underserved demand from small tribal, rural, and international agencies.

Project Status

This project is in the research and specification phase.
Contributions, feedback, and domain expertise are welcome.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from developers, domain experts, and potential users. See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Important: All contributions must be your own original work or clearly attributed open-source material with a compatible licence. Copyright infringement and licence violations will not be tolerated and will result in immediate removal of the offending contribution. If you are unsure whether a piece of code, text, or other material is safe to contribute, open an issue and ask before submitting.

Licence

Licence to be determined. See discussion for context.