The American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) has selected the West Virginia Division of Justice and Community Services Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit Information System as a finalist for the 2017 Igniting Innovation Showcase to be held on March 14, 2017 at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C.
The ACT-IAC’s Institute for Innovation seeks nominations to recognize highly innovative IT products, services, systems, and solutions that benefit government (federal, state, local, and tribal) and citizens.
The Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit Information System was selected as one of 30 finalists out of 120 submissions to compete for the top award.
The Igniting Innovation Award is given to the best overall innovation as determined by social media voting by the audience at the event.
Dynamite Awards are given by a panel of roving judges at the Showcase event. The judges will meet with each of the finalists during the event and select the innovation that best fits each of the following categories: Impactor, Game Changer, Transformer, and Incubator.
The Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit Information System enables the tracking of sexual assault kits from the time they are shipped to a healthcare facility to when they are collected and returned for forensic testing.
Additionally, the system collects invaluable feedback on the quality of the collected kits that will be used to identify potential areas of improvement and training opportunities to ultimately improve evidence collection.
The combination of these two features into a centralized, web-based solution that provides a single point of entry for all stakeholders results in a major process innovation for the tracking and evaluation of sexual assault kits.
The resulting benefit to West Virginia’s criminal justice system is significant: tracking where a kit is at all times will ensure that each is tested and none is lost.
(Jul 1, 2014 – Dan Ringer and guest Nancy Hoffman, State Coordinator for WV Foundation for Rape Information & Services will talk about finding help for victims of sexual violence on this episode of The Law Works. Courtesy of West Virginia Public Broadcasting and YouTube)
After surviving a sexual assault, a victim may seek medical care and choose to have any evidence left on his or her clothes or body collected by a healthcare professional.
The collected evidence is placed in a kit, which is one investigative tool that may help police and prosecutors identify the offender and find connections to other pending cases.
In West Virginia, sexual assault evidence collection kits are distributed by the West Virginia State Police Forensic Laboratory to authorized healthcare providers around the state.
Before the implementation of the new system, distributed kits were recorded in a spreadsheet, and there was no mechanism in place to record when a facility used a kit and sent it on for forensic testing.
The new online Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit Information System enables authorized crime lab users to manage kit information that tracks what kits are sent to a facility and when.
Once a facility collects a kit, the facility updates the system to indicate the kit was collected and that it was sent for forensic testing.
Additionally, the system provides the ability for crime lab users to evaluate each piece of evidence collected in a kit after forensic testing has been completed.
The data collected will be used to provide feedback directly to healthcare professionals in order to aid in increasing the quality of the evidence collected. This in turn will increase the arrest and conviction rates of offenders in West Virginia.
“We are very excited about the new online system and the new processes we have in place that will lead the nation in eliminating untested and lost sexual assault kits,” said Rick Staton, Director of the Division of Justice and Community Services.
“It is also part of our initiative to improve the collection of kits and the data from our new system will do just that. We won’t stop until the sexual assault kit backlog in West Virginia is zero and we lead the nation in the quality of collected kits.”
“We are very honored that our system was selected by the ACT-IAC as a finalist for the 2017 Igniting Innovation Showcase,” added Staton.
“The system provides a major breakthrough to the longstanding problem of lost and untested sexual assault kits which is a problem faced by many states, and not unique to West Virginia.”
For more information about ACT-IAC and the 2017 Igniting Innovation Showcase, visit https://www.actiac.org/events/igniting-innovation-2017?detail=324096.
The online system was developed by the West Virginia Division of Justice and Community Services and the West Virginia State Police Forensic Laboratory in partnership with WV.gov.
Guidance and recommendations were also provided by the West Virginia Sexual Assault Forensic Examination Commission, the West Virginia Foundation for Rape Information and Services, and the West Virginia Hospital Association.
The Division of Justice and Community Services is part of the Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety. For more information about the West Virginia Division of Justice and Community Services, visit http://www.djcs.wv.gov.
WV.gov is the official website of the state of West Virginia and is the result of an innovative public-private partnership between the state and West Virginia Interactive. West Virginia Interactive works with state and local government agencies to build and manage interactive online services and is a subsidiary of digital government firm NIC.
Founded in 1992, NIC Inc. is celebrating 25 years as the nation’s premier provider of innovative digital government solutions and secure payment processing, which help make government interactions more accessible for everyone through technology.
The family of NIC companies has developed a library of more than 12,000 digital government services for more than 4,500 federal, state, and local government agencies.
