Child welfare experiences with automated medical data sharing for children in protective custody

There are multiple factors contributing to the poor health of children in protective custody, i.e. foster care, including a critical gap in information sharing. A hospital-driven solution was developed in collaboration with child welfare to facilitate automated information sharing between healthcare and child welfare organizations, resulting in a web-based data exchange platform. This study explored the utilization and impact of the data sharing solution by child welfare professionals, learning about the perspectives of child welfare professionals accessing the new health information data sharing platform, and by surveying temporary caregivers about the health information they received from child welfare professionals when children were newly placed with them. Interviews revealed three important themes: (1) The necessity of automated data sharing for child welfare professionals to complete tasks related to managing children’s health and managing child welfare requirements; (2) Recognition that data sharing can reduce work burden and; (3) Even with good automated data sharing, there remained gaps in obtaining the complete picture of children’s health. Temporary caregivers reported no statistically significant increase in health knowledge for new placements before and after the implementation of the data sharing system. This study demonstrated that implementing a data sharing system between the child welfare and healthcare systems is feasible and will be utilized by child welfare professionals who recognize the value both for child health and on their own workload. However, additional research is needed to understand how to best ensure transfer of appropriate health information from child welfare professionals to temporary caregivers.