National Children’s Advocacy Center Adopts New Approach to Case Management
The National Children’s Advocacy Center (NCAC) has been at the forefront of the response to child abuse for over 30 years. As the first-ever CAC, it pioneered the Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) approach, which serves as a model for over 1,000 CACs around the world.
The organization also provides guidance to other Children’s Advocacy Centers through its NCAC Training Center, and its annual International Symposium on Child Abuse is now entering its 35th year.
Established over 30 years ago, NCAC is the first-ever Children’s Advocacy Center, and serves as a model for more than 1,000 CACs around the world.
NCAC’s New Case Management Solution
NCAC invented the modern approach to treating child abuse. When the organization needed to upgrade to a new case management system, they turned to Collaborate. Intake, Services, and Reports were matched to the their needs, tens of thousands of case records were migrated from their legacy NCA Trak database, staff was trained up, and NCAC’s Collaborate implementation rolled out live in December 2018.
“Collaborate has allowed NCAC to have one secure location to store MDT, Therapy, Medical, and Family Advocate files and services. MDT partners are also now able to log in and view specific information that will improve our communication and information sharing approach.”
Kelli Mukaddam
Data Specialist, National Children’s Advocacy Center
Customization Spotlight: Outcome-Focused Testing Tools
Clients often come to the table with some interesting customization requests. These can entail writing new functionality from scratch, or tweaking existing components. In NCAC’s case, standardized testing data was a point of emphasis, so we fine tuned Collaborate’s Clinical Assessments functionality to make it even easier to “digest” the data at a glance. Network Ninja’s analysts and engineers developed 11 distinct Elaborate Services to handle a range of Clinical Assessments, including:
- Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT),
- Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children™ (TSCC), and
- Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL).
Test results can be exported to PDFs for easy reading and printing (which is helpful during meetings to evaluate Client progress), while applicable fields are automatically included or excluded, depending on cutoff thresholds. Clients and their families are evaluated throughout the therapy process at regular intervals to gauge the efficacy of treatment, such as CBCL’s Pre, Mid, Four Month, Eight Month, and Post-therapy standards - all via one simple, effective interface.
“Our therapy staff found that Collaborate is easy to navigate and was customized specifically to streamline therapy services and data entry. This was our biggest worry going into Collaborate and it turned out to be the easiest part of the data management system to use.”
Kelli Mukaddam
Data Specialist, National Children’s Advocacy Center
These standardized testing and reporting tools will prove useful for other CACs in the future as well, since they can be easily rolled out to the Collaborate network of more than 300 Child Advocacy Centers. And speaking of hundreds of CACs…
Join Us at the 35th Annual International Symposium on Child Abuse
We hope to see you there!
Dates: March 18-21, 2019
Location: Von Braun Center, Huntsville, Alabama
