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SafeMeasures® 5—New Features and Uses

March 12, 2014 | Matt Wade, Business Development Associate, NCCD

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The NCCD Conference on Children, Youth, and Families, which will take place May 14–16, 2014, in San Diego, California, will feature three Thursday sessions on SafeMeasures®. The first of these sessions will serve as an introduction to the newest version of SafeMeasures (SafeMeasures 5).

The NCCD Conference on Children, Youth, and Families, which will take place May 14–16, 2014, in San Diego, California, will feature three Thursday sessions on SafeMeasures®. The first of these sessions will serve as an introduction to the newest version of SafeMeasures (SafeMeasures 5).

SafeMeasures is a unique and innovative Internet-based reporting service from NCCD. SafeMeasures uses analytics to help social service agencies achieve better outcomes, improve service, and operate more effectively. Child welfare and juvenile justice agencies use SafeMeasures to obtain detailed reports and other metrics created from nightly analyses of case management data.

In late 2013, NCCD began a roll out of SafeMeasures 5. This new version of SafeMeasures has several new features, has an updated visual aesthetic, and allows for easier navigation. Among the new features are role-based report views that allow social services workers to easily identify the key components of their jobs that need to be accomplished. Chief among these role-based reports is the My Upcoming Work view. This view gives workers and supervisors an immediate view of their entire caseload and updates them on the status of critical indicators.

 

The My Upcoming Work menu gives workers an immediate view of what must be done now and helps them monitor other customizable outcomes and process measures related to their caseload.

SafeMeasures 5 continues to allow users to access scorecard-style analyses of agency performance across outcome measures crucial for monitoring proper practice in the field. The Virginia Department of Social Services relies on the Critical Outcomes Report for a color-coded view of these outcome measures in order to monitor trends or produce lists of cases in and out of compliance. The Critical Outcomes Report is an easy way for all levels of an organization to monitor performance. High-level leadership can simply log in to get a visual on various performance measures, while supervisors and frontline staff can drill into their caseloads to determine which cases are adversely affecting each measure.

 

In addition, SafeMeasures 5 continues to offer all of the features on which current users rely. Users can still track trends, view subsets that allow for various levels of further data analysis, and save report views as favorites; they can also still monitor data integrity through data issues reports. SafeMeasures 5 also continues to use Esri GIS technology to help jurisdictions track placement of children and monitor potential impacts of natural disasters.

SafeMeasures is available to child welfare staff in most California counties, New Jersey, Virginia, and Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), as well as to juvenile justice staff in Maryland.

To learn more about SafeMeasures 5, attend the NCCD Conference on Children, Youth, and Families. Find conference information here or contact the SafeMeasures team at safemeasures@nccdglobal.org.

Matt Wade is a Business Development Associate at NCCD.