State launches center of excellence for human services analytics
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The Center of Excellence on Health and Human Services Analytics and Application is the latest project from MD THINK, Maryland’s cloud-based shared services platform for multi-agency health and human services data and applications.
Maryland is standing up a center of excellence dedicated to leveraging data from the state’s health and human services agencies to improve efficiency, services delivery and outcomes for residents.
Center of Excellence on Health and Human Services Analytics and Application is the latest project for the Maryland Total Human-services Integrated Network, a cloud-based shared services platform for multi-agency health and human services data and applications. With MD THINK, social services agencies have a common platform where they can access, share and manage data to enhance customer services, provide integrated access to programs, streamline operations and reduce IT operating costs.
The state's Department of Human Services (DHS) has already used the MD THINK data analytics tools provide dashboards and metrics for case managers to streamline services, increase engagement between state agencies and constituents and improve workforce allocation, DHS Secretary Lourdes R. Padilla said. Improved services delivery helps reduce fraud, waste and abuse and enables better forecasting of resources, budgets and time, she said.
MD THINK analytics also supports the Data-Informed Overdose Risk Mitigation initiative, which provides overdose risk profiles based on links to at least 18 distinct data sources or datasets from multiple state agencies. This year’s DORM report shows, for example, that nearly 69% of people who die from an overdose interacted with a Maryland hospital in the six years preceding their death, officials said. Additionally, nearly 70% of people who die from overdoses are Medicaid-eligible within the year of their death.
Going forward, the center of excellence will be developing a data use case that addresses the intersection of adverse childhood experiences, two-generational poverty and overdose risk.
The product of seven years of work by DHS and other state agencies, MD THINK has modernized the state’s human services technology infrastructure and customer service process.
“MD THINK is a national model for using a cloud-based data system to improve the delivery of health and human services,” Gov. Larry Hogan said in a statement. “The establishment of the Center of Excellence will take MD THINK to the next level by allowing more robust and sophisticated data analysis to inform business operations.”