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APHSA's NEICE Project Gets Favorable Response from Hill Staffers
Just a few days after receiving the Adoption Across Boundaries Award from Voice for Adoption (VFA), staff at the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA) received high marks from congressional staff for work on the NEICE, a project aimed at improving inter-jurisdictional placement for children.
In a November 5 meeting on the Capitol Hill, Anita Light, APHSA's director of the National Collaborative for the Integration of Health and Human Services, and Carla Fults, APHSA's Interstate Division director were praised for work the NEICE team and efforts to expand the program to all states.
During the meeting, Light and Fults outlined NEICE's substantial successes, including creating protocols and software packages so that states can communicate quickly and efficiently amongst member states to the compact and potentially among other health and human services programs; in some cases reducing processing times by nearly 50 percent so that the waits for children subject to interstate transfer is substantially shorter, and most importantly, successfully placing thousands of children in safe homes.
The NEICE Project, a web-based electronic case-processing system that supports the administration of the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC) by exchanging data and documents across state jurisdictions, was launched in November 2013 as a pilot project with six jurisdictions. NEICE significantly shortened the time it takes to place children across state lines, and saved participating states thousands of dollars in mailing, copying and personnel costs. The six jurisdictions involved in the pilot were: the District of Columbia, Florida, Indiana, Nevada, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.
In June 2015, to initiate Phase II of the NEICE project, the APHSA and the Association of Administrators for the Interstate Compact for the Placement of Children (AAICPC) received a grant from the Children's Bureau (CB) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to expand NEICE to all states that are party to the ICPC.
NEICE will bring on 12 new states between June 2015 and May 2016, and additional states in 2017 and 2018, with the goal of having all 50 states, D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands using the system by the end of the grant in May 2018.
APHSA will continue to work with the Children's Bureau and with Congress to achieve the AAICPC's and APHSA's goal of implementing the NEICE in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
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