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Systems and Data Integration in Public Welfare

The current process of planning, administering, and monitoring of delivery of public health and human services is highly complex and information intensive. The growing demand for care, diversity of available services, and financial limitations, among other factors, contribute to this complexity. The goal to select the most appropriate available care that best meets the identified needs of a consumer, while satisfying increasingly stringent fiscal management requirements, can be adequately met only on the basis of timely and competent processing of often substantial volumes of information. The latter comes from a variety of independent and only occasionally compatible sources that further complicate the use of information by imposing numerous security and data confidentiality limitations. The task of information gathering, processing, analysis, interpretation, and use demands commitment of specialized professional resources, which high cost presents a serious problem in the environment of cost containment and budget shortfalls. It is ironic and, at first glance, irreconcilable that funding limitations impose bureaucracy and complexities that can be resolved only by using expensive tools and techniques, which require further depletion of recognizably scarce resources.

Data and systems integration is one of the preferred innovative solutions responsive to the needs of the public welfare industry. Its major benefits are as follows:

Substantial increase of care coordination and other collaborative efforts;
Reduction of administrative costs associated with information management;
Improvement of communications within and among public welfare agencies based on greater level of uniformity in data interpretation and presentation;
Enhancement of outcomes based on informed decision making; and
Enhanced abilities to achieve and maintain compliance with regulatory and funding authorities.

ACA defines systems and data integration in public welfare as a process of consolidating certain functions and joining their previously independent data sets to coordinate administration of these functions for otherwise autonomous programs and/or agencies.

In technical terms, data integration is the process of joining logically two or more data sets to support information management needs of an enterprise. Systems integration is the process by which the different parts of an organism are made a functional and structural whole, which, in public welfare, holds true only partially, because individual programs strive to protect and maintain their operational autonomy. In our view, systems and data integration in public welfare should be defined as a process of consolidating certain functions and joining (logically or physically) their associated data sets to coordinate administration of these functions for otherwise autonomous programs and/or agencies.

The growing diversity of public welfare programs, complexity of their administration, and difficulties with their adequate funding place significant demands on all management areas of public systems of care. Toward this end, one of the major needs of a public welfare agency is to reduce the costs of administrative management which objective is well served by integrating systems and data.

The ACA contribution to innovative solutions responsive to the needs of the public welfare industry as they relate to systems and data integration is most visible in such areas as consulting and modeling, regulatory compliance and reporting, and use of MASTRR™ Solutions product family. In its professional engagements, ACA always attempts to approach systems and data integration issues in their relationship with other innovative solutions for public welfare.