STRATEGIES

June 19, 2001

When Alan Hague arrived at Texas Children's Hospital to fix a FoxPro application that wasn't Y2K compliant, he wasn't expecting anything more than a run-of-the-mill conversion. But the assignment turned into much more for the Houston, Texas-based Digital Consulting and Software Services (DCSS) project manager. It was the beginning of a relationship with the hospital — and chief of psychiatry Dr. Bruce Perry — that would lead Hague and DCSS to launch the first online collaboration resource designed specifically to allow clinicians, caseworkers and counselors to create and retrieve vital information on abused, neglected or traumatized children across the state of Texas.

Words for Thought

"I understand what that little kid is going through ... what it's like to see a social worker every week of your life." —Alan Hague, DCSS

Even though the project is still in a beta phase, early word has spread and DCSS is fielding inquiries on its novel process and tools from states across the U.S. and around the world. WBAT is standing out as a best-practice for coordinating and accessing the volumes of data that impacts so many young lives.

Making It Formal
With all sides sensing tremendous potential, DCSS entered into a formal partnership with the Baylor College of Medicine's Child Trauma Academy and the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services (TDPRS) in the spring of 2000. The project, a public-private partnership funded primarily by TDPRS and supported by other foundation grants, as well as pro bono contributions from the Child Trauma Academy and its private partners, is expected to assemble data on as many as 12,000 children and their families over the next five years.

"It is a unique project and even has a niche place in the clinical world," Hague told ASPnews. "Dr. Perry created a process that, it appears, no one else has thought about. We have a partnership arrangement to deliver a service: They have a process to care for this population. DCSS provides tools and system expertise to deliver this application into existing systems."

Solutions for Real-World problems
What's unique about that process is the way in which DCSS' Web-based Assessment Tool (WBAT) handles essential clinical data entry, retrieval and — most importantly — analysis. Congregated around certain clinical domains, the system tracks the cognitive capabilities of the child, assessment of the social interaction of child with others and other difficult-to-quantify data. The application can then look at the interaction between parents and child and then compare that data to the child's perspective versus the parent's perspective.

DCSS At a Glance

Headquarters: Houston, Texas (other locations in Atlanta, St. Louis and New Orleans Founded: 1990 Employees: 270 Market focus: Fortune 500 IT consulting Partners: Keylink Systems, Microsoft, Cisco, BMC Symantec, Compaq, Citrix, Oracle, Check Point, Hewlett-Packard, Computer Associates. Rated as one of the top woman-owned businesses by Working Woman magazine in 1999 and 2000

"The results might indicate the need for parenting classes," Hague said, "or it might indicate that this is not a safe environment for the child. This has the potential to have a significant impact on children's lives. A social worker can then take that and build a service plan for child and/or parent. This information is used by judges as well, to determine next steps to get them the best help they can get."

WBAT even provides some diagnosis tools for placement alternatives. Does a child need a home that has more psychiatric services or one that does not? Is a foster home better than a shelter? "These assessments are supposed to try to help give you a better feel for the type of services that need to be addressed," Hague told ASPnews.

Privacy No. 1 Priority
For DCSS, the obvious and immediate concerns during development centered around security and privacy issues given the sensitive nature of the data being compiled in the system. Hague cites four layers of security protecting that data in the WBAT, including a virtual private network (VPN) for clients connected to the site, a network password, application-level security (where, based on the client's role, he or she is able to see only what they have been specifically assigned to see), as well as time-sensitive access at the application level. Based on state requirements, clients can lose ability to access those cases.

DCSS uses an Oracle 8i database running under Red Hat's Linux for WBAT. DCSS also uses Windows 2000 Server for the Web server and Allaire Technologies' JRrun application server. The application infrastructure is designed to scale to handle an estimated 10,000 users. But the real technical challenge for DCSS came not in deploying and provisioning the application, but in the training and implementation with users in the field.

"This population we're working with is not nearly as Internet savvy as they professed to be," Hague told ASPnews. "Most of them were very understanding of trying to work through these things. But we had to ask ourselves, how do we write an application that's going to work on unknown machines where the client base can change dramatically from one year to the next?" The answer was to use Java as the primary application development tool. "Base configuration is just an Internet connection, and a you have to be able to support Internet Explorer 4 or Netscape 4. That's it."

The Project Gets Personal
What makes DCSS the right company for the WBAT project is an unusual combination of being in the right place at the right time, having what Hague considers to be a crucial attitude toward business and client relationships, and an odd twist of fate for Hague himself.

"What's the best way to deliver service?" he asks. "By building strong, long-term relationships with clients and understanding what their pain is. We try to show an interest in process and business problems and how we can help take that pain away. We're here to make them successful. If we do that, we'll develop that long-term bond and continue to work for them and continue to grow and every once in a while we're going to get a grand deal like this one."

But as grand as it is, this deal has a special place in Hague's heart beyond the financial incentives for DCSS or the social implications it might have for repairing and improving what is still an arcane system of managing sensitive personal data for literally millions of children across the U.S. Hague can identify with those children because, "I am a product of this system," Hague said. "I was raised in a children's home and I understand, from a child's perspective, what that little kid is going through. I understand the difference between living in a foster home or an underprivileged home, or what it's like to see a social worker every week of your life. I have many surrogate mothers and fathers and I have a passion for this stuff and I believe it's got to spread."

That's a compelling endorsement, even if it does come from the project leader of the WBAT. It's likely that, as DCSS begins to move into other markets and comes up against tough questions from legislators and state agencies, that kind of firsthand experience may make the difference for any potential client considering adoption of the WBAT.

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