Bridging Data Silos: Designing an App to Help San Francisco’s Unhoused Find Stable Care and Housing
In San Francisco, homeless individuals frequently come into contact with various street outreach teams, some dedicated to housing, others to mental health, or overdose response. Each team plays a crucial role in the City’s systemwide street response, but here’s the issue: until recently, none of them had a way to see each other’s progress in facilitating a client’s movement towards stable care and housing.
The Problem
Let’s take the example of John*, an unhoused person who is 59 years old, unhoused for 4 years and struggling with addiction and behavioral health challenges.
When the San Francisco Fire Department (SFFD) responded to John’s overdose, they treated him on the street and transferred him to the hospital. Once John arrived at the hospital, his records were handed off to the Department of Public Health (DPH), and SFFD no longer has visibility into whether John survived the hospital visit. This lack of data sharing prevents SFFD from understanding what works — and what doesn’t — in their overdose interventions.
In another scenario, let’s say John accepts a ride from a Healthy Streets Operations Center (HSOC) worker to a shelter. The worker feels a win is coming, but the moment John is dropped off, the HSOC worker has no way to confirm John actually stayed in the shelter. John could have walked away from the shelter without going inside. The HSOC worker wouldn’t know if their outreach efforts had actually convinced John to accept shelter or not.
These data silos lead to frustration, duplicated efforts, and missed opportunities to get people the help they need.
The Solution
All Street Integrated Database (ASTRID), an integrated data system built by the Mayor’s Office of Innovation (MOI) and the Department of Emergency Management (DEM). ASTRID’s goal is simple yet powerful: break down data silos and give street outreach teams and departments a comprehensive picture of an individual’s journey.
The Outreach Worker App — a mobile tool designed for frontline workers to access key information in real time–is a first wave product built on the ASTRID database.
The app integrates data from nine street teams across four city departments. It provides outreach workers with up-to-date information on the people they encounter, such as recent overdoses, shelter history, and interactions with other street teams. For workers like the ones from SFFD or HSOC, this means they can finally understand what happens to individuals after they interact with them.
Why Does This Matter?
For someone like John, this kind of integrated data access in the hands of outreach workers can be a game changer. Now, instead of every encounter being treated in isolation, outreach workers will have ready access to John’s full encounter and service history across teams and departments. This comprehensive client summary allows outreach workers to build on what’s worked and what hasn’t worked with John in the past and tailor their approach with John to more effectively link him to necessary stabilizing services. Outreach workers will be able to utilize proven tools and approaches to inform their strategic engagement, instead of starting from scratch each new encounter. This readily accessible, comprehensive client summary has the potential to be an instrumental tool in facilitating unhoused individuals from a distressed state in the street to comprehensive care.
It also means departments can analyze what interventions are having the biggest impact on an aggregate scale. Is overdose intervention reducing repeat overdoses? Are certain strategies more effective in getting people into shelters? With the app, these insights become available, enabling teams to tweak their methods and, most importantly, improve outcomes.
The Road Ahead
While this app is just one part of the larger ASTRID system, it’s a critical step forward in how San Francisco approaches its unhoused individuals. By giving workers access to a comprehensive client history, the app breaks down the City’s street response data silos and builds up the City’s capacity to empower an efficient and effective system wide response.
Better care, smarter interventions, and hopefully, more people getting the support they need to move toward stable housing.
It’s still early days, but feedback from the teams will help improve this application. And as more data comes in, this tool will only get smarter, more efficient, and more effective.
This blog is Part 1 of 3
