A Scheduling & Monitoring Platform For Foster Child Visits

The Department of Child Services in Los Angeles, California spends 4 million hours a year arranging 2 million hours of Foster Child visits. All 20 offices in Los Angeles county have their own process and rely on pen, paper and phone calls to organize the visits. DCFS partnered with Sidebench to develop a MVP platform from which they could improve their process into the future.

• Currently there is no system in place to keep track of vital information such as; last minute cancellations, no-shows, and visit notes, needed to advise the court on permanency solutions.

• The communication process between social workers and biological parents is poor, resulting in inflexible visit dates and times for working parents and circumstantial conflicts, resulting in missed visits, disappointed children and a decreased likelihood of reunification.

Geoff Brummett

The concept behind nOCD has been a success from the very beginning and we were very excited to add our UX and UI expertise into the mix so that nOCD could reach as many people as possible.

DCFS presented us with a clean slate challenge. Based on the types of phones given to the government workers, we settled on a responsive web project over a native based application. We focused on three main aspects of the process: creating visit requests, managing those visits, and monitoring the actual visit themselves

Dashboard Variants

.Gov Agnostic Styling Variation

After repeated user tests and information gathering sessions we arrived at a hybrid, step based platform solution. The tool was built to act as a “filing cabinet” where all visits and visit requests are attached to the case in question and organized around the request itself. The system tracks the full history for visits and cases which case workers can collate to better inform the courts that monitor each case. This solution segmented views to allow for different user types with different permissions which better protects the children’s information.

Dreamcatcher locavore iPhone chillwave, occupy trust fund slow-carb distillery art party narwhal. Ennui shabby chic Brooklyn, fanny pack direct trade Tumblr