This three-year grant responds to 2007 Priority Area One: Increased Efficiencies in Child Support Enforcement through Reengineering Business Practices and Increasing Levels of Automation. Under this grant, New Jersey will develop procedures to ensure that an increased number of children in the IV-D caseload have a medical support coverage option available to them. Currently, only 26% of children in the State’s IV-D caseload are covered by medical support.

This goal will be accomplished through a partnership between the Office of Child Support Services, the New Jersey Judiciary, and the Division of Medical and Health Services (Medicaid). Overall, this demonstration will encompass a three-step process:

1. Case Reviews: Utilizing a decision matrix, a medical support facilitator (MSF) will perform case reviews to ascertain available coverage and determine the most appropriate coverage on a case-by-case basis;
2. Court Orders: Developing and implementing court procedures that allow for ordering cash medical support in appropriate cases; and
3. Private Group Insurer as an Option: Developing a contractual relationship with a private group insurer to cover children in cases where the parents are unable to provide private coverage and are ineligible for SCHIP or Medicaid.

New Jersey will establish a minimum of three demonstration project sites. The project will include a process and impact evaluation the results of which will influence statewide implementation.

This three-year grant responds to 2007 Priority Area One: Increased Efficiencies in Child Support Enforcement through Reengineering Business Practices and Increasing Levels of Automation.” In conjunction with the District of Columbia (DC) Child Support Services Division, the goal of Maryland’s “Erasing Boarders” project is to expedite the registration and enforcement functions necessary for successful management of inter-jurisdictional child support cases.

To accomplish this goal, the project will establish procedures for managing the interstate caseload through the use of automation and the co-location of designated child support staff in Prince Georges County, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. The project will provide an integrated, focused, methodical, and measurable approach to the problem of managing interstate child support cases.

“Erasing Boarders” will also test the effectiveness of an interstate team to develop and implement strategies to re-engineer how critical documentation in inter-jurisdictional cases is shared. This team will consist of the Prince Georges (PG) County Office of Child Support Enforcement, PG County Office of the Sheriff, and PG County Department of Social Services in addition to the DC Child Support Services Division, DC Law Enforcement, and DC Department of Human Services.

This three-year grant responds to 2007 Priority Area Two: Improving Scores in Child Support Performance. The purpose of the project is two-fold: 1) to evaluate the effectiveness of the District of Columbia’s (DC) recently reinstated and expanded pass-thru and disregard policy; and 2) to clean up data in DC’s automated child support computer system.

Since the enactment of the Deficit Reduction Act in 2005, DC was the first jurisdiction to increase its pass-thru and disregard above $50/month. Beginning in April, 2006, this pass-thru amount was increased to $150/month in current support to TANF families and disregarded when determining TANF benefits. The underlying purpose for enacting these policies was to help TANF families and to encourage noncustodial parents with children on TANF to pay more child support while encouraging custodial parents to cooperate more fully with the child support program.

The project’s evaluation will concentrate on assessing the extent to which DC’s pass-thru and disregard policy increased child support collections. A secondary goal will be to see whether these policies contributed to an increase in the establishment of paternity and child support orders.

The data clean-up effort will focus on older cases that were adversely affected (e.g., missing key information) prior to and during the time DC converted to its current automated system nine years ago.

This three-year grant responds to 2007 Priority Area Two: Improving Scores in Child Support Performance. The purpose of the project is improve performance in current child support collections through a partnership with the courts and the employment of early intervention techniques and enhanced technology. This demonstration will also build upon the analyses emanating from a State-supported program evaluation (2005-2006) and the recommendations proposed by an internal workgroup tasked with developing options for improving child support collections.

The end goal of this demonstration is three–fold: 1) to improve the State’s performance in the collection of current child support; 2) to build better working relationships with noncustodial parents; and 3) to establish a more effective working relationship with the courts. The evaluation will include both a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the interventions.

This three-year grant responds to 2007 Priority Area 3: Improved Child Support Results through Collaboration on Shared Caseloads with Other Agencies. To ensure that increased numbers of children in the child support caseload have access to health care coverage, a partnership has been developed which includes the Texas Child Support Agency, the Office of the Attorney General (OAG), and the Texas Medicaid/CHIP agency, and the Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC).

This demonstration will build upon and strengthen efforts undertaken by the OAG and HHSC to advance medical support/Medicaid collaboration through improved processes and automation. The key components of this demonstration include:

1. Joint Staff: The staff will demonstrate what can be achieved through a cross-agency collaboration that breaks down interagency barriers and fully implements new Federal and State medical support rules;
2. Identification of Alternative Health Insurance: OAG will partner with the Texas Department of Insurance to identify other forms of health care coverage, including stand-alone child health plans, pre-paid insurance plans and health care accounts; and
3. Establishment of a Statewide Process for Introducing New Medical Support Processes: The joint staff will test and evaluate the efficacy of the new processes and then aid OAG in training field staff for expansion throughout Texas in later years.

The evaluation will include a process analysis of the first year’s efforts to glean promising practices, recommend policy training, data sharing, and process changes for implementation years 2 and 3 of the grant. The final evaluation will examine the impact of the proposed project on medical support and State medical cost outcome measures.

This three-year grant responds to 2007 Priority Area: 3: Improved Child Support Results through Collaboration on Shared Caseloads with Other Agencies.

The State’s demonstration builds upon previous efforts to change the method of referring new TANF and Medicaid cases to Washington’s Division of Child Support (DCS) from a paper to an electronic process.

Since the transfer of complete case file information on noncustodial parents is still a challenge, the State intends to revamp and invigorate the e-referral process in two stages:

1. Expansion of data sharing with vital records and full automation of the data exchange. DCS staff currently shares voluntary paternity affidavit data with the Department of Health’s (DOH), Office of Vital Records. DCS would fully automate its data exchange with DOH which would eliminate the need for cumbersome case-by-case record checks; and
2. Statewide training of TANF/Medicaid and DCS staff on the process of referring new cases. The State intends to develop a joint TANF/Medicaid/DCS training curriculum to improve the quality and collection of information on noncustodial parents.

It is anticipated that more accurate and complete e-referrals will expedite the establishment and enforcement of child support for new TANF and Medicaid cases. Through a rigorous evaluation built on an experimental (treatment-control) design, the State will be able to report precise performance impacts associated with the automated DCS-DOH match. The impact of the staff training will be evaluated separately.