Integrating “Street Response” data: a new priority project

This was originally posted on May 3, 2023.

A few months ago, the Department of Emergency Management approached us with a challenge: the street teams participating in San Francisco’s Coordinated Street Response System were stymied in their efforts to scale “case conferencing” (structured meetings where reps from multiple teams/departments work together to create plans to get specific clients into treatment, shelter, and housing).

San Francisco’s Coordinated Street Response Program — credit: Mayor’s Office of Innovation

Today — case conferencing happens when a street team identifies a specific client and then calls other teams into a meeting to discuss that specific client’s needs.

Current laws in San Francisco around client privacy allow for this type of information sharing — one on one conversations about single clients — but it doesn’t allow departments to share data about ALL their clients at once in order to prioritize resources, proactively identify challenging clients, etc.

So here’s what we’re seeing right now:

1. Street teams collect and store data in siloes due to legacy privacy regulations and policies.
2. Case conferencing is effective, but it takes WAY too much time to handle the ~3500 people struggling on the streets of San Francisco.
3. We can’t run effective analyses on the City’s street response program.

But there’s hope…

California recently passed a law updating the Welfare and Institutions Code to allow local jurisdictions like SF to create “housing multi-disciplinary teams” (or HMDTs) for the specific purpose of assessing needs and linking people experiencing homelessness to services, shelter, and housing. In short, we now have a legal backing to share data among teams working to help people experiencing homelessness.

We’re now in the final stretch of finalizing the SF HMDT. It will include:

• Mayor’s Office
• Dept. of Emergency Management (DEM)
• Dept. of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH)
• SF Fire Dept. (Fire)
• Dept. of Public Health (DPH)
• Dept. of Technology (DT)
• Digital Services and DataSF
• and more in the future…

Ok, so what about data sharing?

DEM’s work at the center of SF’s street response has surfaced a strong desire — shared by Fire, HSH and DPH — to increase interdepartmental data sharing.

The Street Response System has identified a rough theory of change:

• Integrating client data across departments engaged in street response will help generate better outcomes (off the street and on a path to success) for individuals struggling in the streets of San Francisco.

Based on this, we (alongside DEM and DataSF) will begin looking into data linkage across street outreach programs to allow for mapping of interventions with outcomes and identify other ways to improve our outreach efforts and ease the homelessness crisis.

We are aiming to build a database or similar system to allow joining of disparate datasets across departments.

We think the linked data will allow us to answer questions like:

1. What services or programs are offered across various programs? What is accepted? Refused?
2. How are individuals interacting with different departments’ outreach teams? Can we improve coordination?
3. What are the outcomes associated with various interventions, especially those that involve multiple departments? What can we learn about how to improve the effectiveness of our interventions?

Taking a phased approach

We’re starting this project with “Phase 1 — Discovery” to answer the following questions:

1. Do departments want to share data?
2. What does not sharing data result in? Is it actually a problem?
3. Will we actually be able to link data across departments?

Phase 1 is in flight, and we’re excited to share this journey with you.

This was originally posted on May 3, 2023. That blog has now been deprecated and is republished here on Medium in its entirety.