Since 2017, the California Health and Human Services (CHHS) Agency and the Children’s Data Network (CDN) at the University of Southern California have partnered to improve services for and generate knowledge about the citizens of California through data sharing and integration. With support from the AISP Learning Community initiative, CHHS and CDN first conducted a massive “record reconciliation” effort to link and organize administrative records across major CHHS programs and data sources. This effort resulted in the development of encrypted master “intra-agency” client identifiers and constituted an important first step toward organizing CHHS data into family units and households – context critical to understanding CHHS clients and service experiences.
Now, CDN and CHHS are working with a number of other state partners on the development of a secure, cloud-based research enclave for hosting record-level research data sets and accompanying linkage keys. Once operational, the California Health and Human Services (CHHS) Research Data Hub (RDH) will provide carefully controlled, role-based access to analysts within CHHS and give external research partners access to curated data sets and statistical resources within this analytic environment.
