We Love Illinois Schools
We Love Illinois Schools
BEACON lights the way for families in crisis
BEACON is the state’s new online portal designed to help Illinois families connect to behavioral health resources. Available for use by state agency staff, healthcare providers, schools and families, it streamlines the process of finding and accessing relevant services to help ensure that every child in Illinois can receive the support they need. This portal can match families with the programs that provide the help they’re eligible to receive. Our guest, Dr. Dana Weiner, helped create the portal and explains how it works.
You can explore BEACON at beacon.illinois.gov.
Our theme music is by José Rivera.
ISBE Podcast: BEACON
RHODES 0:03
Hello, we are the Illinois State Board of Education, and we love Illinois schools. I'm Dusty Rhodes in the Public Relations Department. When a student is experiencing a mental health crisis, what can we do? Who can we call? Where can we turn? Navigating the behavioral health landscape can be overwhelming and complicated, but now there's BEACON to light the way. Launched just last month, this online portal allows parents to locate services, request help and upload documents, streamlining the process for finding care. We sat down with the leader of this initiative to learn more.
You want to just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background?
WEINER 0:49
Sure. Hi. This is Dana Weiner. I am a clinical psychologist by training and a researcher in practice. I am a Senior Policy Fellow at Chapin Hall, and since February of 2022, I have been serving in the governor's office as the Chief Officer for Children's Behavioral Health Transformation. So, I have spent the last 25 years or so providing data analytic consultation, technical assistance, program evaluation and implementation support to child serving systems like child welfare, juvenile justice, children's mental health and education in Illinois and across the country. So, I bring that experience and lessons learned about challenges and barriers as well as innovation to this work. I also have spent a lot of time working on improving access to services for families of kids who need them.
RHODES
BEACON is the next step in that work, right?
WEINER 1:08
So BEACON is the first of 12 strategies named in the Blueprint for Transformation, which was released in early 2023. The Blueprint called for a centralized care portal to streamline the process of identifying appropriate services for which youth are eligible. And BEACON is the system that was built in partnership with Google and lives at the Division of Mental Health in the Department of Human Services to serve all Illinois children and their families.
RHODES 2:28
Tell me how the name BEACON was chosen. Is it another acronym?
WEINER 2:33
BEACON is loosely an acronym. It stands for behavioral health care and ongoing navigation. But we thought that the symbolism of the word beacon, in shining a light on what is available, shining a light on the path to help, was a powerful image.
RHODES 2:53
Okay, and I know that we have a timeline of how it's rolled out, and I know it's already been rolled out to school districts. Right? When does the public get to use it?
WEINER 3:09
BEACON was initially announced by myself and the governor in January of 2024 and it went live in August of this same year. Initially, we started using it, just with the inter-agency team of people who've been working to expedite placement and services for kids who are stuck in hospital or stuck in their family homes without adequate services. Those people have been practicing working together with a rudimentary version of a similar portal for about two years. So those people had about six weeks to use the portal and iron out the wrinkles and identify any problems.
And then on October 1, we began launching it to all of the helpers in our field, and yes, that included school personnel, specifically school counselors, social workers and special ed administrators, as well as many other people in helping roles. So, hospitals, social workers and probation officers and attorneys and anyone else, providers, anyone else who might be in a position to help a family navigate a service landscape. Our plan is to launch it to the public on January 15, but it is currently live, and so sometimes parents find it and they are able to use it now, but our public awareness push doesn't begin until January.
RHODES 4:42
Okay, and so the functionality for a parent would be just go online. Is it a website or something?
WEINER 4:51
What BEACON does for parents is it allows them to look for services for which their youth are eligible. It speeds up that process and puts everything in one place. So, for those of you who are familiar with the Blueprint, appendix E of the Blueprint was a massive eligibility crosswalk, basically looking at all of the state funded programs for youth behavioral health challenges and the eligibility criteria for them. What we did with BEACON was we automated all of that information so that BEACON immediately can tell a family, based on the information they provide about their young person, what state funded services their youth might be eligible for.
It also links to other systems that will help them navigate to find community based services, and parents can use BEACON anonymously and just look around for things, or they can enter their child's information create an account. When they provide consent, their child's information will then be visible to a team of resource coordinators and clinical specialists in the Division of Mental Health. If the parent at or guardian asks for additional assistance, they can receive outreach from those people at the Division of Mental Health who will begin the process of helping to link the family with appropriate services.
It has a few other functions available to parents as well. Parents told us, while we were developing BEACON, that they wanted a place to upload important documents like potentially the IEP or the hospital records or the psychological evaluation, and so in their account, they can upload those documents so that when a state agency or provider asks for that information, they can just say it's in my BEACON account. And again, once they've given consent, those partners can see that information, which is much easier for families than finding those documents, faxing them, copying them, sending them somewhere.
So, it does does quite a number of things for families, and it's pretty user-friendly when it is on a website. And when they go to the website, they'll be guided through a set of questions to get the those services. So, BEACON is a website. It's not an app, but it is a mobile enabled website. So, you could view it on your phone and it will work. You could view it on a tablet or on any device, but it's not, technically speaking, it's not an app. It's not an app for your smartphone. It's a website.
RHODES 7:22
Okay, well, just the fact that it's mobile enabled is awesome, because not every family has a computer. What is the address of the website?
WEINER 7:34
It's beacon.illinois.gov.
RHODES 7:36
You mentioned that the document-upload feature was a request from parents, so they would scan with their phone or something, and just be able to put that stuff up there. But it would be secure because there's also consent forms, right?
WEINER 7:52
The information that's entered in BEACON lives on a secure and encrypted, cloud-based platform that the state of Illinois was already contracting with Google to maintain. So Google doesn't have access to any of the information that gets entered into BEACON, and it lives securely in this place. It is locked until a family gives consent for the state agency partners to view the information that they've entered, and that's required to use these features and begin that they provide that consent. That overcomes some of the historical barriers to hearing information across the state agencies, and those barriers were part of the reason why it took so long to get services, because the coordination between those agencies was next to impossible, because of both legal and technological barriers.
RHODES 8:48
Can you give us an example of how complex it can be to get the care you need for a kid?
WEINER 8:56
Yeah. So there, there are barriers that arise in almost every step of the process without this supportive technology and the new processes by which the agencies are able to work together. So everything from… you're a parent and your child needs help, and you start searching for the types of services that they need and might be eligible for. And historically, you would have had to look in many different places for that information.
So, in Illinois, we have six agencies that provide different types of services and supports for kids with behavioral health challenges. And in the past, you would have had to go to each of those agencies and really dig to find information about what was available. BEACON puts all that information in one place, as I mentioned. It provides quick and automated processes for obtaining consent for sharing information.
But behind the scenes, it also helps to streamline the way in which people collaborate, because the back end users of BEACON can assign tasks to each other, and the people who oversee BEACON can see how long people are taking to do those tasks. So, if things get stuck, everybody who's managing BEACON can see right away. There’s a set of dashboards that Google also developed for us that let us see how many cases are open, how many cases are waiting on something, what they're waiting on, who they're waiting on. So, there's really a much, a very expedited and streamlined system that's far more efficient.
So, as I mentioned in the example, it used to be that a parent would have to look in a lot of places, and then they would try to get a response from the state agencies, and it was hard to identify a person, in most cases, who could provide the information they needed. Now we have a dedicated team of people who -- to parents’ surprise and delight, I think -- are reaching out in a very timely way to ensure that parents have the navigational help that they need. And this is resulting in kids, you know, we can identify if what we need to do is enroll a youth in Medicaid or submit applications for the Family Support Program or help educate a parent about the process of getting an IEP and getting services through that channel. So, it really has sped things up, and we can see in the data on the dashboards the degree to which it is improving the efficiency of delivering services to families.
RHODES 11:38
Wow, that is a an amazing piece right there, because just as a mom, I'm thinking about all the times that I had to try to find the perfect moment in my day that I could make an uncomfortable phone call that I didn't want my co-workers to overhear and describe whatever challenges are going on with my child and try to advocate on their behalf. It sounds like you've got a machine that's going to prompt somebody to call me back.
WIENER 12:14
Yes, exactly. Most of the people in our systems are in these jobs because they want to help people, but they've been so bogged down in the navigation of even their own agencies that they haven't been able to spend as much time helping families. So now what happens is the family puts their information in, it goes to a resource coordinator at the division of mental health. That person gets in touch with them, makes an appointment for that phone call that hopefully isn't an uncomfortable phone call, and then can hear what the needs are and come up with a plan to link the family with services.
RHODES 12:50
It sounds like there's going to be fewer post it notes on computer terminals, like because it will actually just be taken care of instead of waiting for someone to look at their post it note. And you also have an algorithm, and an AI algorithm that that can take the information and figure out what the young person, what services a young person is eligible to receive?
WEINER 13:17
Yeah, so that's what I was describing earlier. It's based on appendix E in the Blueprint, which is publicly available. Everyone can see it. It basically just speeds up the process of saying, okay, if we have a youth is this age and has these issues and this funding type and lives in this area, what kinds of things might we, might the state be able to offer? So, it just speeds up that process by putting it all in one place. It's not generative AI, I mean, like, yes, anytime you use an algorithm, it's basically a set of if/then statements, and it speeds things up because it can do it faster than a human can. But that's the extent of the AI use in this case, it's not generative AI.
RHODES 14:01
It's not going to hallucinate something about a person. Has the Juvenile Justice System started using it?
WEINER 14:10
We have a planning call this week to think through who the appropriate people are to train in BEACON. It doesn't look from the data, I can see that they've begun using it, although I've certainly talked to some judges, some attorneys. I haven't yet been in front of an audience of probation officers, but I plan to be, and they will indeed be using it. Hopefully. I hope they will.
I do want to also clarify that while BEACON speeds things up, it is a routing application, and it is just one of 12 strategies in the Blueprint that we need to implement fully in order to transform our system and ensure that the needs of young people are being met. So, BEACON is intended to work in conjunction with a number of other components, including a statewide resource referral tool that our partner agency, HFS, is working to procure and increase targeted increases in capacity so that we can reduce the wait times for services. BEACON doesn't solve those problems.
It doesn't diagnose or assess anyone, doesn’t prescribe services, and it can't make you an appointment for services. What it can do is connect you with the right resources and people and reduce the frustration and the ambiguity around seeking services for a young person.
RHODES 15:40
Okay, so it's not a magic wand. I forgot to ask you if school districts have started using it already.
WEINER 15:51
Yes, you did. I mentioned that I've trained school personnel, including counselors, social workers and special ed administrators. And I can see in the back-end data that I can just see by rule, I can't see which people are using it, but I can see that school personnel are entering cases, yes.
RHODES 16:13
The statistics about mental health challenges for young people are pretty stark, and that's why we are making this entire push, right?
WIENER 16:28
Yeah, I think the Governor's office stood up the Children's Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative in recognition of both a growing youth mental health crisis and coming out of the pandemic a depleted workforce and possible gaps in resources. So, we're trying to address all of those things.
RHODES 16:49
Do you know what some of the targeted … where you're going to look for a capacity increase?
WEINER 16:57
Yeah, so we have been working to ensure that we have adequate residential treatment for young people. We're also looking to expand in home services to support families, so that kids can be maintained in their homes and not need residential treatment. We are also looking to, you know, one of the things that's happened as a result of all of these processes is we've illuminated some services that people were not aware were available to young people. So, you know, to the extent that some of the problems can be overcome with more visibility and information, we're doing that.
But we're also, of course, going to need to continue to support strategies to grow the behavioral health workforce, which is partly being pursued by the governor's Behavioral Health Workforce Center. We are working, we are collaborating with them, and also looking at strategies to build career pathways for people who might be in more paraprofessional roles, and not necessarily masters trained clinicians, but still having a lot to offer in supporting the continuum of mental health services.
RHODES 18:05
That's great, because paraprofessionals are kind of the unsung heroes. What were some of the services you discovered that had been kind of under the radar?
WEINER 18:18
Oh, so there were some programs… there are programs for young people who are experiencing a first episode of psychosis, and though there are providers all over the state who deliver those, I think were people were less aware of those. And you know, that's just one example. There are others that now those things are a little more visible because we put them in BEACON so they can appear on lists for families, if, if appropriate for the problems that youth are struggling with.
RHODES 18:54
Okay, that sounds kind of amazing. I think that's the end of my questions. Is there anything else you wanted to say that I didn't give you a chance to say?
WIENER 19:04
No, this has been great. I'm grateful for the opportunity to talk through what BEACON is and what it can do, and I hope everybody will give it a try.
RHODES 19:12
Thank you so much. That was Dr. Dana Weiner, Chief Officer for Children's Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative. If you missed the address of that BEACON website, it's beacon.illinois.gov. Please share this podcast with anyone who needs this important information and thank you for listening.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai