Municipalities to explore how AI can speed up interventions for children and young people

The initiative comes from Nära vård i västra Värmland – Arvika, Eda, Säffle and Årjängs municipalities together with Region Värmland. For just over a year, in collaboration with DigitalWell Arena, they have been working on this issue as part of the Children and Youth Journey project.

At present, children and young people are often assessed by several different organisations – schools, healthcare, social services, the police and leisure services – but without anyone getting an overall picture. This increases the risk of children and carers with similar problems receiving different types of support and of interventions being introduced too late.

“Children and young people who do not receive the right support in time risk ending up in difficulties such as mental illness, school absence, social isolation, substance abuse or crime. Often there are early signals, but they are not perceived as worrying individually – or get stuck in the respective activities without anyone seeing the whole picture,” says Lotta Lundin, public health developer in Årjäng municipality.

Early signals that are often missed

Examples of such signals can be:

• increased school absenteeism, poor performance or changes in behaviour
• recurrent health care visits for stomach pain, headaches, anxiety or sleep problems
• contacts with social services linked to finances, housing or the carer’s own difficulties such as substance abuse or mental health problems.
• minor disorderly behaviour, shoplifting or associating with older youths known to the police

“If an AI-supported tool could bring together such information, it would help professionals to recognise patterns earlier and provide support before problems become serious. It’s not about replacing the professionals’ judgements, but about giving them better conditions to make the right decisions in time,” says Lotta Lundin.

Next steps: dialogue with businesses

To conclude the project, the municipalities are now issuing a Request for Information (RFI) to companies to explore what such a solution could look like.

The parameters identified so far show that an AI-supported solution should:

– strengthen professionals’ judgements – not replace them
– provide support in SIP and coordinated care work
– enable secure data sharing according to GDPR and legislation
– be simple and useful in everyday life

In Årjäng municipality alone, there are currently around 100 social service cases with needs-assessed outpatient care interventions involving children and young people. In comparison, according to the National Board of Health and Welfare, more than 35,000 children and young people across the country had at least one such intervention in November last year. A key issue is therefore that a potential solution can be scaled up nationally.

A possible way forward – even after the project

The RFI marks the final phase of the project, but the journey towards a real solution that can make a difference for vulnerable children and young people has only just begun.

“We will deliver a final report on how municipalities can move forward. If there is no solution on the market that fulfils the needs, I think this could be a suitable case for the Demand Acceleration methodology, where public procurement is used as an engine for an innovation process”, says Elin Westlund, Innovation Manager at DigitalWell Arena, and concludes:

“It will be interesting to see the market response. If we can solve such an urgent challenge, it would make a big difference. This is a national problem and we have already been contacted by other municipalities interested in how the work is progressing.”