AB 597: Child abuse and neglect: information: computerized database system.

Existing law allows the Office of Child Abuse Prevention to fund, through allocations provided to local counties, child abuse and neglect prevention and intervention programs. Existing law provides the criteria under which a county selects agency projects and services to be funded under these provisions, including giving priority to private, nonprofit agencies. Existing law authorizes a county to establish a computerized database system within the county to allow designated provider agencies, which include schools, among other entities, to share identifying information regarding families at risk for child abuse or neglect for the purpose of forming multidisciplinary personnel teams for the prevention, identification, management, or treatment of child abuse or neglect or to provide child welfare services. Existing law makes this information confidential and accessible only to authorized persons.

This bill would authorize the Counties of Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, and San Mateo to jointly establish a computerized database system to be used between and among those counties, and would authorize that system to also share specified identifying information regarding families at risk for child abuse or neglect for research purposes. The bill would authorize the sharing of personal identifying information for research purposes only upon approval by an institutional review board. The bill would set forth various conditions for the review and approval of a research project for the purpose of protecting personal identifying information. The bill would provide that, for purposes of this jointly established system, a provider agency also includes local educational agencies. The bill would require the counties to decommission the computerized database system if the ability to share identifying information regarding families at risk for child abuse or neglect between and among the counties and for research purposes becomes available within the statewide child welfare information system. The bill would require any county that establishes a computerized database system under the provisions described above to decommission any duplicative functionality within its computerized database system if any functionality of the countys computerized database system becomes fully available and deployed within the statewide child welfare information system.