Anyone who has worked in child welfare remembers certain children. I still think about a teenager I visited while he was living in a detention facility several hours away.
Visits to detention centers feel like a different meeting than a visit at home or at school. I drove a long way, went through security and could not bring in my pen or notebook. Before we met, most of what I knew about him came from records describing his offenses, his struggles and his diagnoses.
I was nervous.
Then I sat across the table from him.
He reminded me of my little brother. He loved Legos, missed his grandmother, and really wanted me to find a way to bring him his Jordans. He was kind and polite. He shared family stories filled with both challenge and love.
What I had read about him may have been accurate, but it was not complete.
After our visits, I wrote my notes. I hoped the next person who worked with him would read them and see more than the data points in his record.
The gap between what a record says about a child and who that child actually is has stayed with me as Augintel's work has evolved. Case workers have always captured the fuller picture in their case notes. The challenge has been making that information visible across thousands of records without reducing children and families to categories or counts.
Moving beyond finding information to understanding patterns
Narrative technology can help workers find important information in case notes. It can identify documentation related to a requirement, such as good-faith efforts to visit a child, or help a worker find what a child said in their own words.
We are now also using narrative to help agencies understand themes across groups of children and families. That makes it possible for child welfare agencies to learn about practice strengths across the agency, uncover service gaps they couldn’t see before, and better understand the needs and barriers affecting their youth and families.
How child welfare agencies can get started with narrative
Many agencies know their case notes hold valuable information but aren't sure where to begin. Thousands of records can feel overwhelming. The good news is that you don't have to analyze everything at once. Through our 60-day narrative analyses, I've worked alongside agencies to answer specific questions about the youth and families they serve, and a few approaches have made the biggest difference in getting the best information from narrative.
1. Start with a clear question
"What is in our notes?" is too broad a question. Useful analysis begins with a defined population and a question the agency needs to answer. The question might focus on unmet needs, placement stability, relational permanency, medication, or barriers to engagement. A clear question makes findings more useful.
In one project, a child welfare agency wanted to examine how the experiences of older youth in out-of-home care differed based on whether they were placed in licensed or unlicensed placements.
Other agencies may start even more simply with questions like:
- What needs appear repeatedly in the notes?
- Do the documented services align with those needs?
- What barriers are children, families, and workers describing?
- What are the bright spots and strengths we can learn from?
2. Use narrative and structured data together
Structured data can tell us who is in a population, how often an event occurs, or how groups differ on a recorded outcome. Narrative adds context: relationships, strengths, motivations, barriers and what people tried. Neither tells the full story alone.
In most of my projects, structured data helped us identify the population, while the notes helped us look more closely at documented needs, service alignment, barriers, and examples of practice that appeared to help.
3. Treat findings as a starting point
Narrative analysis is descriptive and exploratory. It is not an evaluation, and it does not establish cause. Documentation practices, local context and information that was never recorded all affect what the analysis can show.
The findings should help agencies ask better questions, not reach quick conclusions about a child, family, worker, or program. People closest to the work are essential to interpreting what the patterns mean.
In a recent project with a child welfare agency, we found that 34% of the cases analyzed included documentation of substance use indicating a potential need for treatment—not simply recreational use. However, among youth with this type of substance use documented in their case notes, only 6% had substance use treatment or related support documented. This gap gave agency leadership a starting point for asking better questions: Was it related to documentation practices? Challenges accessing or delivering services? Or something else?
4. Connect insight to action
The goal of analyzing narrative data is not to produce a report. The value comes from using what we learn to examine practice, address barriers, build on strengths, and monitor change over time.
For example, after looking into the substance use treatment gap more closely, this agency's leadership team found out that case workers couldn’t access appropriate services for these youth in their county.
The narrative analysis gave the agency concrete numbers showing how many youth were affected, along with the evidence they needed to advocate for more resources.
Summary: The details shouldn’t get lost
I still think about that young man in detention. No analysis could fully capture who he was. But the details workers take time to document—what a child values, who they miss, what they need and what gives them hope—should not disappear into a case file buried under mountains of notes. Those details can help the next worker understand one young person.
Taken together, they can also help an agency understand where practice is working and where it needs to change.
That's the idea behind Augintel's 60-day narrative analysis. Agencies work with our team to define a clear question about a specific population. After a one-time data export, we analyze every case record in that cohort, not just a sample. At the end, our team walks through the findings with the agency, and the agency keeps a report of the results. It's a starting point for examining practice, addressing barriers, and advocating for what staff, children, and families need.
After years of working with agencies on narrative data, I'm always curious about what questions leaders are trying to answer. If you have one in mind, I'd love to hear it and talk through if narrative could help.
Book a time with me here to chat.
Tracy Rohrdanz is is Director of Customer Impact at Augintel, where she helps child welfare and human services agencies turn the information in their case notes into insight they can act on. She brings more than 13 years of experience in human services and technology to the role.
Tracy began her career in human services in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, working directly with children and families. That experience shaped her belief that the details caseworkers write down matter, both for the next person who works with a family and for the agency trying to understand where practice is working and where it can improve.
Since then, she has helped advance data-driven, integrated business applications across human services. She has a particular focus on bridging the gap between technology and service delivery. At Augintel, she partners with agencies to define the questions that matter most to them and to use narrative data to improve outcomes for the communities they serve.
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