Domain Atlas / Child welfare & family services
Illinois Rapid Safety Feedback
Illinois's Rapid Safety Feedback flagged thousands of children at 90-percent-or-higher risk of serious harm — beyond any caseload's capacity to act — while children who died in known-to-system cases had not been flagged; the agency ended its use in 2017.[4]
What happened
Illinois's use of the Eckerd/MindShare Rapid Safety Feedback tool ended in 2017 after reporting revealed the alert pattern: thousands of children scored at 90 percent or higher probability of serious harm — far more than any caseload could act on — while children who died in known-to-system cases had not been flagged as top-risk. The agency concluded the predictions were not reliable enough to build practice on.
The sociotechnical reading
RSF is the alert-saturation case. A flag that fires for thousands is operationally equivalent to no flag: it cannot change how finite attention is allocated, and it manufactures both alarm fatigue and false reassurance (the un-flagged case reads as cleared). The failure was as much interface-institutional as statistical — what a score means for a worker's next action was never governable at those volumes. The throughput-honesty patterns (pace the pipeline; risk-tiering that respects real capacity) are this case's direct descendants.
The concepts used in this reading are defined in the Field Guide; the governance responses live in the Practice Library.