Colorado Case Study

Colorado family services are state-supervised and county-administered, which means that policy and practice are set at the state level by the Colorado Department of Human Services, but 64 counties are tasked with carrying out child welfare casework on the local level. That means 64 varying types of technology, staff levels, and resources. Even though Colorado's state analytics teams work well with data savvy county partners, there is often a disconnect between the data produced by the state and counties because data was pulled directly from a transactional database. 

In addition, there was no oversight governing how data was processed. Two people answering the same questions, such as from the state and county or two different counties, might come up with significantly different answers depending on their own data analysis. At the same time, there was a large movement towards continuous quality improvement as a result of a performance improvement plan put in place by federal oversight agencies.

When ROM was introduced as a reporting solution partner, both county and state staff helped map data from Colorado's case management system to the ROM base working tables. County data analysts gave input for building the custom system. This partnership helped the counties to embrace ROM even though it was a state-initiated data reporting effort.

The state and counties worked together to develop and define common performance measures to address the performance improvement plan. Each county integrated the ROM system into its business processes, building custom reports and adding as many users as needed. ROM soon became a single source for outcome and data measurements for all 64 counties, plus the state agency.