A: CWS-CARES will provide a similar mechanism for counties to continue to receive daily data downloads as they do today from CWS/CMS. CWS-CARES data is replicated from the production Salesforce system to Snowflake that is the data source for extracts and reporting. CWS-CARES will provide organizations with additional detail on the CWS-CARES’ data extract capabilities.

A: Data will be available for upload and download. The specific technical capabilities for upload and download, such as SFTP, are under review and will be shared with counties soon. Child Welfare Services-California Automated Response Engagement System (CWS-CARES) users will have the ability to upload and download documents and associate them to CWS-CARES entities such as Case or Person.

A: Yes. Assuming system data mappings are defined in the user stories before document templates are developed and templates are being integrated with the new CARES system.

A: Yes. Data mappings are expected to be defined in the user stories for template development and integration to begin.

A: The screening number will remain the same (for the screening) throughout the life cycle of a child’s involvement with the child welfare system. Should the screening advance to an investigation and/or a case, the investigation and case numbers would be different. CWS-CARES V1 will maintain the history of all “units of work,” including screening, investigations, child welfare cases, court cases and eligibility files, associated with a given person.

A: The National Provider Identifier (NPI) registry is a set of data that could help identify providers and reduce duplicates by matching name and location data, but the NPI data does have its limitations. The data is only for providers that handle Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act (HIPAA) data, so may not cover all provider types stored within Child Welfare Services/Case Management System (CWS/CMS). The NPI data is also a self-register database; it is only as good as the data entered by the provider, so there may be limitations on accuracy and timeliness. There may also be gaps in what data NPI stores and what CWS/CMS stores, for example, the NPI provider may only be assigned to one address (main agency), but in CWS/CMS there could be multiple addresses for that provider where they physically perform services.

A: Yes, CWS-CARES will act as an electronic case file. However, counties may still require hard copy files for documents they would not choose to scan and upload to the CWS-CARES electronic record.

A: CWS-CARES V1 will provide processes and tools to support data quality - including search, data quality monitoring and Master Data Management (MDM) - to prevent and resolve duplicates, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies. With respect to the termination of the relationship between the child and biological parent, the system will correctly record such facts and rigorously protect information without deleting the history required for process improvement and program evaluation and without generating duplicate person records.

A: Yes, CWS-CARES will include functionality that allows social workers to view changes made to a record over time. The CARES Data Infrastructure (CDI) will record all data changes (create, update, and delete transactions) to support supervision, auditing, and analytics.

A: As of December 2023, E-Adopt for Resource Family Approval (RFA) is currently being researched and evaluated to determine if it is a candidate for external system data conversion.