Top Mission: Save The ChildrenTop Mission: Save The Children

Two years ago, the Florida Department of Children and Families was integrating systems for its mental-health and substance-abuse programs when a child-protection case burst onto the headlines.

The abduction of Rilya Wilson prompted the department to embark upon a farther-reaching integration effort, says IT director Glenn Palmiere, one that includes integrating with school and child-care systems around the state that track child attendance.

Rilya Wilson was a 4-year-old girl who'd been taken from her cocaine-addicted mother and then placed with her grandmother. In January 2001, a woman and a man posing as employees of the Department of Children and Families abducted Rilya, telling her grandmother they were taking her for a neurological evaluation. The grandmother's calls to Rilya's caseworker were ignored, she later told Miami-Dade County police.

Sixteen months after the child disappeared, the department realized it had no idea who had taken Rilya or her whereabouts. The police have labeled the case a possible homicide.

The case produced a storm of criticism of the department and its child-tracking abilities. A blue-ribbon commission appointed to investigate asked Palmiere whether better information systems would prevent such a case in the future.

"My testimony has been that no information system can guarantee it won't happen again. But we can build a system that connects the legacy systems and databases to provide caregivers with a more complete picture," he says.

Palmiere's department is working on a system that will not only be able to connect the 59 databases and legacy systems in the department but will also be able to go out to attendance databases in 67 school districts around the state. As a result of the Rilya Wilson Act, signed into law July 16, preschool and child-care programs file their own attendance reports with the school districts, so a child who misses several days shows up in a report for caseworkers.

This part of the new OneFamily departmental system is projected to be working by July. OneFamily currently allows outside providers to go to a portal Web site and fill in a form on services provided to a child or other family member, or they may upload data to a department database directly over the Internet. OneFamily works for 422 providers of mental-health and substance-abuse services, such as alcohol-abuse counselors, marriage counselors, and psychological counselors. Ultimately, it will provide two-way communications with more than 4,000 providers outside the state agency.

"Every single piece of information will be provided to a caseworker," Palmiere says. For example, a caseworker will be able to see if a child is attending preschool or school, whether a child is receiving medical care or other specialized services, and even whether grades in school are improving or declining.

The department has established connectivity between legacy systems using Ensemble connectivity software from InterSystems Corp. It supports not only data reporting between systems but can make calls from one application to another, such as determining an applicant's eligibility status for Medicaid or other social programs. It also can allow reporting by outside providers over the Web.

Caseworkers can query the department's massive mainframe IMS databases, getting back hierarchical information in a view that shows them the relationships in which they're interested. In addition, OneFamily can extract and present information from the department's Oracle and IBM DB2 relational databases.