PATH NC, short for Partnership and Technology Hub for North Carolina, is a centralized information system built to bring all counties in the state under one digital roof for the first time. It allows child welfare workers to access statewide case histories, track services in real time and use evidence-based decision-making tools, all from the field — even without Internet access.
Launched on June 18 with an initial group of 15 counties, the new system is rolling out in phases over the next eight months. By the end of that period, all remaining counties are expected to transition to PATH NC for intake and assessment. The second phase — set for 2026 — will expand the platform to cover ongoing services like foster care and adoption case management.
The platform includes advanced search and analytics tools designed to integrate data from other North Carolina agencies. It also features dedicated portals and dashboards for providers and families. Once all counties are on board, caseworkers will be able to access a child or family’s full history — even across county lines, which is a first for the state.
And to ensure those insights lead to more informed decisions, state officials worked closely with county leaders to redesign North Carolina’s structured decision-making (SDM) tools — guides for assessing risk and safety in households with an allegation of abuse or neglect. Now nationally certified by Evident Change, a national nonprofit, the updated tools are fully integrated into PATH NC to help standardize and strengthen decision-making across the board.
“It’s not just a data entry system,” Rob Morrell, director of business information and analytics for NCDHHS, said. “We’ve designed this to be a decision support system.”
The new platform marks a major shift for North Carolina. Until recently, each of the state’s 100 counties operated child welfare programs using different technologies. In many instances, the director said, child welfare systems are still not digital.
“Almost half of our counties are still relying on manual or paper processes,” Morrell said. “We’re talking about filing cabinets, Word docs and manila folders. And then we have counties that have their local technology systems and everything in between, so what really inspired PATH was multifaceted.”
This isn’t North Carolina’s first run at statewide modernization. An earlier effort to create a more unified child welfare system, between 2017 and 2019, didn’t go as expected because at the time, Morrell said, the state lacked a unified practice model — meaning each county approached child welfare differently.
Learning from the past, Morrell’s team understood early on that success with PATH NC would require more than just new software — it would mean aligning agencies around a shared vision and building consensus from the ground up. A governance committee of state and county leaders shaped every stage of the project, from selecting vendors to defining functionality.
That shared vision was especially critical when it came to improving how information moves across the state. Real-time data sharing quickly emerged as a top priority. Morrell pointed to a common scenario to measure its significance: a child abuse investigation in one county might be missing critical context if a family had previous cases in another. Without a shared system, he said, that vital information could slip through the cracks, and not having real-time access to that data could pose serious safety risks.
PATH NC was built with a mobile-first design to address those gaps, so caseworkers can document visits, access records and make assessments while in the field — even offline, if no Internet connection is available.
This type of up-to-the-minute capability helps reduce duplicative data entry as well — one of the biggest pain points, the director said.
“If you enter data at one part of a case and it’s needed later, it rolls forward,” Morrell said. “That’s one of our guiding principles: data should be entered once and used many times.”
The new system’s current focus is on intake and assessment, but future modules will include in-home services, foster care, adoption, licensing and financial tracking, according to Morrell. A family and provider portal — features that previously didn’t exist at the state level — will also simplify things like foster parent applications.
The $65 million total project investment also includes AI-powered tools: a new chatbot will roll into the system in the future, to interpret complex policy in plain English. Another tool with AI that’s in the works is a potential “case co-pilot” that could answer basic questions like how many visits a child has had in the last six months.
The state, Morrell was quick to clarify, isn’t replacing child welfare social workers’ roles in decision-making related to children and families. Each tool, he said, is “meant to support workers, not replace their judgment.”
Looking ahead, the department hopes to integrate PATH NC with Medicaid and education systems to give workers a fuller picture of a child’s health and academic records. Even integration with the state court system is on the wish list — pending legislative support.
Success for Path NC, Morrell said, will be measured by user satisfaction and better outcomes: fewer repeated abuse cases, faster reunification with families and more informed, consistent decisions across the state — and “if social workers and DSS directors are saying, ‘PATH NC helps us support children and families better.’”
For states considering similar reforms, the director said he recommends having people who have done the work of child welfare at the table, and maintaining open and frequent communication with all stakeholders to “keep the conversations going and make your processes agile.”
