DHS to start pegging contracts to outcomes

The city wants more accountability from the contractors who work with 6,000-plus children under the city's care.

For the first time since privatizing a large chunk of its child welfare system, the city says it will create scorecards to rank its seven primary contractors, or "community umbrella agencies."

Department of Human Services Commissioner Cynthia Figueroa, who was appointed in July, is implementing the performance evaluations.

"It's come as a surprise to a lot of people that there's an inability to say who are the highest performers or who is struggling and how is the system doing overall," Figueroa said. "We have to hold ourselves accountable to the public and be clear about how we're making gains."

The scorecards, which will be published online, will look at a range of categories, including the quality and timeliness of required home visits as well as diversity of leadership within an organization.

The city will begin pulling data from the seven community umbrella agencies in July and publish a first-quarter report card in October. From there, the contractors will be graded annually, and the performance evaluation will factor into their contracts.

High achievers could be rewarded. Underperformers that do not improve by a deadline could lose their contracts.

"If we see there are concerning elements and we don't see any improvement, I'm not going to wait a full year with the safety of children at stake, we'll make a difficult decision," Figueroa said.

The seven contractors are at the heart of the city's system, handling nearly all cases and covering the entire city. Engaged after the starvation death of Danieal Kelly while she was under city supervision in 2008, they received $220 million in 2016 to perform casework. They also subcontract with foster care and adoption agencies and run some prevention services, such as food pantries.

Because they handle nearly ever case, they are often connected with tragedies. The city said the scorecard would measure "quality of practice," which could include how the organization responded leading up to a death or serious injury of a child in its care.

The city handles hotline calls and investigations and retains an oversight and training role.

Until now, DHS has renewed contracts individually, without much analysis. The evaluations will offer an opportunity to see how one provider stacks up against another.

Figueroa said she does not want the program to create divisions between the contractors, which operate in the 10 police districts in the city, or between the providers and DHS.

She met with the heads of the agencies recently to brief them on the scorecards.

"None of this is shocking to us, and the truth is we want to get better. We want to use objective data to figure out where to allocate resources to continue to make improvements," said Regan Kelly, CEO of Northeast Treatment Center in Northeast Philadelphia.

Debra Lacks is the CEO of Wordsworth, which operates two community umbrella agencies in West Philadelphia.

Wordsworth's residential treatment facility was shut down in October and its contract with DHS suspended after a 17-year-old boy died in a fight with staff. Wordsworth's foster care and case management work for the city is separate and continuing.

Lacks said the organization was prepared for the more rigorous analysis. She said implementing scorecards a year ago would have been unfair, given how understaffed providers were then.

The city has since approved hiring more caseworkers to bring an average caseload down to 10 families.

"We feel much more comfortable working toward the outcomes and goals now," Lacks said. "It feels collaborative. What they're proposing right now is within the realm of expectations."

The scorecard will look at whether the appropriate number of visits were made as well as the quality of those visits. Compliance with court orders and case supervision will also be analyzed.

DHS will measure how quickly children are reunited with their parents or placed in adoptive homes, the financial health of the organization, and how well the organization engages the community.

Leadership and governance - including staff retention and board and staff diversity - will also be considered.

DHS has long been criticized for lack of diversity.

"They're getting these gazillion-dollar contracts with the city, and what's the evidence they're hiring locally?" Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown said.

Reynolds Brown said she hopes putting diversity on a scorecard tied to contracts makes it a higher priority.

Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez represents the Seventh District, encompassing North Philadelphia. She that she thinks metrics are important, but that recognizing the demographic differences between the contractors is important as well.

"It's not apples to apples. If you look at my deep-poverty areas, is it fair to compare that with Germantown and Chestnut Hill? You're going to have more complicated cases, a lot of the cases dealing with housing issues," Quinones Sanchez said. "I don't know that a scorecard gets to the core of it."

Figueroa said that DHS was taking such factors into consideration, but that not all agencies have the same size contract.

"The resources are proportional to the communities they're serving and not a result of how many cases are served," she said. "We're paying for where the resources are needed."

jterruso@phillynews.com

215-854-5506@juliaterruso