Choosing case management software is a commitment. You are trusting a system, and the people behind it with your records and your compliance for years to come. The features matter, but so does finding the right partner to build your agency on, and assurance it will hold up when an auditor is at the door or a family’s case is on the line.
The people behind SAM
When you choose your software you are choosing the people who will help you run it, answer you when something breaks, and still be there years from now. So it’s worth knowing who they are.
Since 2007, SAM has been built and dedicated to supporting private foster care and adoption agencies. That focus is where our fluency comes from. When you talk about a home study, a disruption, an ICPC delay, or a post-placement report, the people on the other end already know what you mean.
Some of them learned it firsthand. A few of the people who build and support SAM even came out of agencies themselves, so you are not explaining what you do to the people meant to support it.
You’ll get to know us well over time. The person who helps you set up a new program is often the one who answers when you have a question about it later. We tend to build lasting, symbiotic relationships with the agencies we work with as we get to know each other and trust builds.
Know that with SAM, you are building on something steady.
Plenty of software promises you'll be up and quickly, often in a week or so. But what they mean is the software is available for your use. Doing the work of making it fit and work for your agency takes longer because your team is teaching SAM how you work. Only your people can do that. What you end up with is a system built around your agency instead of a generic tool you work around.
Getting there moves through five steps.
Your team. Name your SAM lead, the system advocate dedicated to seeing your project succeed, and the program directors who shape your process. It needs a real owner with the authority to make decisions.
Your goals and requirements. Get clear on what you need SAM to do and what you want out of it, so you're building toward something specific rather than moving everything over for its own sake.
Your workflow. Write down how you do the work you do, program by program. That is what SAM gets built around.
Configuration. Our team takes your workflow and starts the buildout, one program at a time, drawing on what has worked for other agencies wherever you're unsure.
Training and feedback. Your team learns the tool and how records connect, shares the custom flows with the people who will use them, and provides feedback on what to adjust. This becomes a virtuous cycle that makes SAM better for you.
You own the thinking. The goals, the workflow, the decisions about how you work are yours, and they have to be, since the system is being built around your agency. Our team handles the technical buildout as a professional service.
These steps form the workflow for getting the most out of SAM. Once you’re running, you cycle back through them when a new grant brings new reporting, requiring you to refine the goals. Or a program changes, so you redraw that part of the workflow and we reconfigure it. A state updates a regulation, and you adjust. Each pass gets SAM a little closer to how you work. Early on, our calls are how your team gets unstuck. Later, once you’re running the day-to-day on your own, the calls shift toward what's next: a new program or report or simply another piece of the work you want SAM to manage.
What implementation looks like
Audit-ready compliance
For a lot of directors, one of the hardest weeks of the year is the one before a licensing review or an audit. You know the requirements but proving you met them is the problem as you pull documents, check dates, and hope nothing slipped while the rest of your work kept moving. And given the number of government agencies involved, it’s usually much more than an annual occurrence.
SAM changes what that looks like. Because every requirement, date, and document lives in the case record, preparing for a review means pulling what the reviewer asked for instead of assembling it from scratch. When a licensor needs specific files, you give them access to just those, and they find their way through the records without your team printing or scanning anything.
One agency we work with went through a licensing renewal that took about two hours. The same kind of review at the director’s previous agency, run on paper files, was a full eight-hour day.
For federal and state reporting, compliance is part of the daily system since your records are already in place, helping you avoid penalties for missed deadlines. And saving you a scramble at the end.
Your agency holds some of the most sensitive information a family will ever share, and protecting it is part of protecting them. It is also part of keeping your license. We built SAM so that meeting that responsibility doesn't require you to become a security expert.
SAM is cloud-based, so it’s ready wherever your team works, whether they’re in the office or out doing a home study. Your data is backed up with redundancy built in, and we hold to service-level commitments for uptime, so the system is available when you need it.
You decide who sees what. Custom permissions control who can open which records, so the different parties in a case only see the parts meant for them.
Getting into SAM takes more than a password. Multi-factor authentication confirms that the person signing in is really a member of your team before any records open, and the system keeps its own record: auditing tools log every modification and every point of access, so you can always see what changed, who changed it, and when.
SAM is fully HIPAA compliant, and our privacy practices are published in our privacy policy.
Security and your data
