Child Welfare

This research brief uses claims data from the Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Programs to examine the behavioral health diagnoses and treatment services received by children and youth involved with the child welfare system in 2019.

This report provides information to state, tribal, and local child welfare and behavioral health agencies that are interested in linking their Medicaid and child welfare data.

In this brief, we highlight experiences and practices from substance use treatment providers and their human services partners when serving people of color. We selected providers that focused on serving people of color, and this study was not intended to assess outcomes or effectiveness of any of the practices highlighted.

This brief presents estimates of the number and percentage of children whose parents engage in problematic substance use, including past-year substance use and SUD by substance type and child demographics. Key findings include:

In recent years several researchers and child welfare agencies have begun developing predictive risk models to support child welfare decision-making. Predictive analytics is a sophisticated form of risk modeling that uses historical data to understand relationships between myriad factors to estimate a probability score for the outcome of interest.

This practice guide is a resource for a broad range of human services programs aiming to be more inclusive of and responsive to fathers. Building on literature from the field and interviews with human services providers that engage fathers in services, this guide outlines strategies for advancing equity in human services programs:

This brief summarizes an environmental scan and series of key informant interviews describing the challenges that human services programs face in identifying participants with substance use disorders (SUD), and subsequently referring them to treatment. The review focused on child welfare services, domestic violence services, Head Start, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

This brief summarizes discussions among experts participating in a roundtable. The discussions focused on promising strategies to identify substance use disorder (SUD) among human services participants and refer them to treatment and recovery supports. The roundtable concentrated on four programs: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, child welfare, domestic violence, and Head Start.

Program Integrity and Effectiveness through Data and Analysis (PIEDA) aims to enhance the capacity to share and link data between state child welfare and Medicaid agencies on issues at the nexus of the two systems. PIEDA intends to sustainably improve the data infrastructure of states to increase their ability to analyze challenges experienced by families involved in child welfare systems.

This brief reviews the role of health and human service providers in preventing Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.