Texas Childrens Advocacy Centers
Breaking the cycle of abuse, one child at at time.
Client
Profile
Children's Advocacy Centers of Texas (CACTX), a state sponsored
non-profit governmental organization maintains the mission to
provide a professional, compassionate and coordinated approach to
the treatment of sexually abused children and their families and to
serve as an advocate for all children throughout the state of
Texas. "CACTX is a shining light for all Texas Congressional
Districts. We should be proud of both the government and non-profit
entities that have come together to work collectively in the best
interest of children." Ken Bentsen, United States Congressman.
CACTX operates 57 facilities throughout the state of Texas and
serves 90% of all Texas counties in the state today.
Executive
Summary
CACTX engaged the services of DYONYX to develop best practices and
streamline operations in order to improve compliancy and required
reporting at the state level. The state ultimately determines the
qualification for Grant Funding of the individual Assessment
Centers based on their ability to accurately report counties
served, cases worked and regulatory compliance. The DYONYX team
documented and traced all major workflows and applications
currently in place as the first step towards optimizing the
workflow processes. This provided the business rules, best
practices and repeatable processes that were used to develop an
application to track child abuse cases on a statewide scale. Prior
to this best practice study and resulting application development,
information access to child abuse cases was very limited. This
effort facilitated the much needed, concurrent access to child
abuse cases needed by the ten governmental agencies working in
tandem in the diagnosis, interview, judicial (prosecution) and
ongoing therapy processes for the children and case workers.
Equally important, the improved processes and case tracking system
increased the accuracy and efficiency of the monthly reporting
required at the state level for the much-needed Grant Funding.
DYONYX staff consultants Interviewed over 25 CACTX facilities to analyze and document process and procedure in the use of core systems, creation of state compliance policies and procedures, information sharing requirements, reporting and regulatory compliance requirements. We analyzed tracking and management needs of over 1,200 discrete pieces of data per case and the accessibility requirements by multiple agencies. The needs analysis methodology provided the blueprint of the current procedures utilized as well as a design goals document and project plan.
Once all optimized processes and workflows were documented, DYONYX created a custom application suite that took into consideration the current technology and architecture available for optimized connectivity and interoperability. All policy and procedure compliance criteria were incorporated into the system to ensure accurate compliance and reporting.
We then implemented the new system customized to the optimized workflows and provided connectivity and integration among all of the 57 CACTX agencies as well as integration with related state agencies and legacy systems. This application is now being moved into an ASP model for provision of service on a national level. DYONYX successfully designed a centrally managed, web-based application that now handles all CAC Texas case files. XML, XML Schema, and XSL technologies were used to build the web portal. Each case file includes multiple clients with each client requiring more than 1,200 pieces of information to be tracked. DYONYX facilitated the transition from a barely functioning system to a state-of-the-art system, which has allowed the state facilities to focus its efforts on helping children rather than trying to utilize poorly developed software.
To learn more, visit www.dyonyx.com
