“We at the California Health and Human Services Agency are proud to sign the Cradle-to-Career multi-agency data sharing agreement. It aligns with our vision of a Healthy California for All, where all our children can play and learn, and where necessities like housing and childcare are complimented by access to physical and behavioral health services.
This agreement moves us a step further in our pursuit to better leverage data to understand the current conditions in our communities, the impact of our existing programs, and the opportunities before us to improve service delivery. While we have built systems to amass data, we find ourselves data rich but information poor. Actionable and timely data will help us advance social and economic mobility to improve the health and well-being of children, families, and individuals.
Today’s announcement furthers our work at CalHHS. We established the CalHHS Center for Data Insights and Innovation to leverage data to improve outcomes. In many cases, our clients’ varied needs, such as food insecurity or lack of access to affordable health care, do not happen in isolation of one another so we built the CalHHS Program Dashboard to help us better understand those needs.
We also know that Californians are entering multiple doors to access various programs and services. For example, two-thirds of CalWORKs clients receive benefits from three health and human services programs; another quarter receive services from four programs. With this in mind, we have created data products like the dashboard and the CalHHS Data Playbook to help our staff and partners better understand the multifaceted nature of service provision in a dynamic, intuitive format.
Focusing on data enables us to prioritize our work on what matters the most to the people we serve. Therefore, we are taking our work a step further this year by launching the statewide Health and Human Services Data Exchange Framework, a single data sharing agreement and common set of policies and procedures that will govern the exchange of information among public and private health and social services entities beginning in January 2024.”
For more information on the Cradle-to-Career data sharing agreement, visit Governor Newsom’s Press Release.
To learn more about CalHHS, visit the California Health & Human Services Agency website.
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