This post is a summary of the linked case study below about First 5 Riverside County’s implementation of Bonterra Impact Management (fka Apricot by Social Solutions Global, Inc.). Sidekick Solutions was the contractor for initial implementation and continues to support First 5 Riverside County’s expansion of the solution for its Home Visiting Provider programs (CalWorks and non-CalWorks) and its network of Family Resource Centers (FRCs).

Background

First 5 Riverside County is a multi-service child advocacy organization that invests in programs and partnerships that promote, support and enhance the safety, health and early development of young children, families and communities in Riverside County, California. The organization had recently taken on new family resource programming from the Department of Social Services and needed a new way to effectively navigate case management and referral workloads.

The agency’s legacy data management system required considerable manual intervention, leading to data entry errors that made accurate reporting across its diverse program portfolio a challenge. It would take multiple business days to review data and reports, slowing productivity. Most reporting was done outside of the data system. Additionally, their previous data system could not produce integrated views of a family across multiple services, limiting staff’s abilities to optimally assess client information.

Solution

Bonterra Impact Management (Apricot) was selected to coordinate referrals to Home Visiting Providers and support engagement at Family Resource Centers.

The Home Visiting implementation in Bonterra Impact Management (Apricot) was configured as a universal data model to capture various home visiting models in one unified reporting structure. The models include Healthy Families of America (HFA), Nurse Family Partnership (NFP), Parents as Teachers (PAT), SafeCare, ParentChild Plus (PC+), and Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY). Each evidence-based model uses different service types and assessments, but are tracked universally in Bonterra Impact Management so that Riverside County can report on contract performance quarterly and annually. This includes:

• Universal Participant Profile and family intake
• Consent and photo release expiration management
• Program Pre-enrollment and Screening
• Program Enrollment (for duration and case assignment)
• Service activity tracking
• Referral tracking for resource navigation
• Assessment tracking with pre/post comparison reporting
• Material goods distribution and amount limits per family

However, a key assumption of the build is that each home visiting provider can only see their caseload of participants and enrollments. This maintains security across the system. Participants can also be shared when there is joint services or care coordination between providers.

The solution also includes one-click reporting for quarterly contract reviews of home visiting providers to measure count of parents and children served, successful completion of programs, screening outcomes (including Ages and Stages Questionnaires, ASQs), frequency of home visits, and referral counts. The new centralized model has increased staff bandwidth, resulting in a mindset shift from crisis intervention to redefining the work they do as intentional, bi-directional, cross-system and coordinated for prevention.

Outcomes

• Platform actively supports 70+ users across 7 home visiting programs, and 11 family resource center sites, and allows for case management and reportable data collection across 20 data entry forms
• Provides an intentional approach to coordinate services around prevention, crisis intervention and supporting families
• Produce integrated views of a family across multiple services, increasing ability to optimally assess client information
• Increased collaboration across service providers for the benefit of children and families
• Support agency vision for creating new connections to drive cross-system integration and impact for families
• Simplified and streamlined the ability to refer families and see who is using which
  services
• Centralized data platform with greater ability to see false positives or errors, with higher reporting quality
• Creates reports with significant reduction in staff effort, including one-click reporting for annual FRC roll-ups to County agencies and quarterly reporting to support the scale of its home visiting reporting (down from prior workloads on reporting of weeks or months)