Builds a collaborative culture of data sharing as a foundation for improving child care outcome.

The Strategic Program

Terben was formed around the idea that improving public care for children starts with care providers having access to better data. We believe that agencies needed a simple framework for collaboration to consolidate their data, and that administrators needed a low-cost, low-resource solution for accessing that data. Today, we're using these basic ideas to serve both the foster youth and at-risk youth populations by improving the effectiveness of state and county agency care workers, law enforcement, and judicial services.

More than Just Software

Youth Insight is a program combining consulting, work-group inservice, and software to empower a cooperative political and technical environment for data sharing. The program provides new solutions for working around traditional obstacles with the resources that agencies have available to work with. We believe that in developing solutions, anything that can’t be done with existing people is already failing to improve effectiveness. So, our objective is to develop solutions which can be implemented by existing personnel.

Collaboration

The program begins by bringing participants in the care community together in a cross-functional team with prescribed objectives and actions. Participants in the program include administrators, care providers, and technicians representing state and county social services, school districts, probation, juvenile courts, and other agencies and groups.

Whether for foster youth, at-risk youth or another population, the data, software, and collaboration program have very similar requirements and solutions. The team forms a Youth Insight Network which meets regularly to ensure data sharing, work flows, and the software are refined for continuous improvement in efficiency and effectiveness.

Leadership and Training

Terben provides the how-to guidance for building collaborative relationships among participating agencies, does the leg-work in acquiring the necessary agreements, assists with data collection, and manages the software application which aggregates placement, health, and education data provided by participants.

And, of course, Software

The software application used by participants to view child data runs on Terben’s network of servers. It is offered as a subscription service which eliminates the demand on IT for installation and maintenance of new hardware and software. More importantly, it allows Terben to more rapidly and cost-effectively evolve the software to take advantage of best practices and new data.

By taking a strategic approach in building a collaborative workgroup, working with existing resources, and using software as a service, we believe that the Youth Insight program helps counties to rapidly improve efficiency and effectiveness at relatively low cost.