Join us on Thursday, December 9th and 11:00 AM EDT for a virtual workshop-style roundtable discussion with other child-serving organizations in various stages of the collaborative process. Everyone will leave with an understanding of the possibility of a collaborative approach and the steps necessary to be ready to implement it.

Your organization and your schools are serving the same children; wouldn't it be great if you could know how the children are doing in school - grades, behavior, attendance, etc. You could collaborate to understand the value of the programs you're providing, including measured improvements, attendance, etc. You could have real-time data that enables your community to understand the difference your organizations are making.

The main purpose of community data sharing is to create a community-wide information system that supports interactions with many service providers to deliver a comprehensive, longitudinal perspective on each child, leveraging data and technology to provide better, faster, and continuously improved services. In Community Data Sharing Initiatives - Community Collaboratives - participants share information regarding the children they serve. It is essential to have a clear definition of how the sharing is managed and authorized and which information is shared. 

The Backbone Organization (Longitudinal Community Database) of the collaborative is the lead partner organization that is responsible for community agreements on data governance and data sharing, an agreed-upon approach to parent consent, collaborative goals, and the associated data set to be shared. This organization is responsible for Data Management Services: the “scoping” of data access for data sharing partners and users, defining the approach to mapping children between organizations, consent administration, and an approach to managing data quality. [e.g. duplicates]

• Legal Data Sharing - Community Agreement
• Organization & User Scoping 
• Child-Organization Mapping
• Consent Administration
• Data Quality

Data Users are partner organizations that are interested in accessing the Data Contributors’ child-related information either in aggregated, de-identified or identifiable format. The leverage the COMET Community Reporter. Commonly, Data Users are also Data Contributors, but not necessarily (e.g.: funding organizations like United Way, County, or City services).

• Aggregated & De-Identified Community Reports & Exports
• Geo-Coded Map Demographics
• Data For Program Evaluators
• Compare Your Organization To The Community
• Identifiable Data Reports & Exports, For Those With Proper Consent

COMET Operations

Data Contributors are partner organizations that directly interact with children and record child-driven information in COMET, or in their own operational database - Pass-thru Data Contributor -- that will be integrated into the data-sharing initiative. Another approach to contributing data is to provide program participation as a Roster Data Contributor through a list of your children (ID, last, first, DOB, gender). Note that contributors "own" the data they contribute in an explicit or implicit agreement of confidentiality [e.g.: Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act (FERPA)] with each child’s parent.

Data Contributors - Collected In COMET

• Community Organization Running Programs & Providing Support
• Funder Collecting Data From Multiple Service Providers
• School District SEL Program
• City Sending Data (Pass-Thru)

Data Contributors - Collected External To COMET

• Student Information Systems (SIS)
• Community-Based Organizations
• Government & Heath Systems

Parent Portal

Parent / Guardian involvement is key to a data-sharing initiative. COMET’s community data sharing solution supports parent approval of the sharing of their child’s data. Recording and leveraging parent consent is fundamental to a data-sharing initiative. 

• Parents Understand & Control Their Child's Data & Can See Their Child's Information, Including Assessment Results
• They Can Provide Input On Their Child & Communicate With Those Who Work With Them

Community Reporting 

COMET’s community data sharing solution is powered by our sophisticated reporting application - COMET Community Reporter, supporting aggregated and de-identified community reports and exports, geo-coded map demographic visualization, data for program evaluators, community comparison reports, and identifiable data reports and exports. 

• Aggregated reports: Typically, such reports may pull data from multiple Data Contributors and consolidate / aggregate accordingly. These reports are authorized through the data-sharing agreement between the service provider partners. 
• De-identified child-level reports or data extraction: Typically, these reports are used for research purposes. Records are de-identified meaning that they do not contain any data element that could identify a child (e.g.: name, ID, etc). These reports are authorized through data-sharing agreements between the service providers. 
• Identifiable child-level records: It is possible to report on identifiable child data, but this data sharing requires valid parent consent and clear authorization from the Data Contributor.

Only data sharing can enable outcome measurement across organizations. So, if an after-school program and a school want to measure if their collective work has a positive impact on school attendance and academic outcomes, and to determine which programs are effective and to fund, data sharing is essential.

Ideally, every community's child-serving organizations will share data and collaborate to improve common goals; realizing the vision of a comprehensive, longitudinal community database supported through the efforts of Partner Organizations that work together in a Community Data Sharing Initiative in which its children are thriving.

Ready to join a collaborative? Take our readiness quiz.

Original Posting 12.10.16

Most organizations today know that part of their infrastructure is their data management system. And their operational excellence depends on having great data collection processes. But it is very easy to overdo the effort in the interest of keeping track of details and also providing inaccurate information by short-cutting methods. Here are a few sound guidelines to use when developing or refining your organization's data collection processes:

8 Tips for Data Collection

1. Only collect data that you know is needed and will be used.
2. Don’t re-collect data that is already available and kept up-to-date.
3. Make sure the person providing the data will have accurate information.
4. Make the survey / test / instrument as easy as possible: keep it as short, minimize effort and time required to complete, schedule it for an appropriate time (example, a time of the year that's less busy), use standard terms and be consistent
5. Have the survey / test / instrument reviewed by knowledgeable professionals
6. Provide clear instructions (purpose, how the data will be used, deadlines, etc.)
7. Do a pretest of the survey on a pilot group and adjust according to feedback.
8. Understand and communicate what laws and regulations govern the data (examples could be FERPA or HIPAA).

Original Posting 02.05.18

...and by value, we mean necessity. If your programs are collecting data about the children and youth enrolled, you have hopes of sharing that data outside of your organization and you know parent consent is needed, here are some things to think about.

We work with a lot of organizations who collect data and ask us to help them understand how to share that data with another organization (a partner, a funder, a school district, etc.). We usually explain to them that the how of sharing the data is almost always doable. There is often time and cost involved but connecting two data sources is not an impossible task. There also need to be legal agreements in place to share data between the organizations (more on that topic here). However, often the hardest part which not everyone considers, is securing parent permission to share that data.

A few tips we’ve shared with customers related to parent permission include:

• Permission first. Secure parent permission to share data from the start. Include consent forms for data sharing with your sign-up /registration process and secure that permission up front. This saves you from having to go back later on and connect with parents one-by-one to get permission.
• Think ahead. If you’re going to ask for permission to share data, you need to be specific, but also think ahead. If two years from now you’re hoping to connect with the school district, ask for permission to share with them now. This saves you from having to go back and ask permission or amend your forms down the road.
• Be specific. Finally, you need to be specific about what data you’re going to share and who you are going to share it with. The language needs to be clear to the parents. A blanket consent to share any and all data with whomever you choose won’t work out well (at least, this what the lawyers tell us).

At COMET, we work with our customers to the best of our ability to help them through thinking about what parent consent they’ll need, how best to collect it and where to store that information. We can't advise on all of the legal requirements and we always encourage organizations to consult with their lawyer, but we can talk about the experiences we've had with others and we're happy to share sample agreements and recommendations.

If your organization is thinking about sharing data with other groups to help improve outcomes for kids, check out our Resources page for more materials on data sharing. 

Still have questions? Contact us!

Original Posting 10.05.18

From healthy birth weight to school readiness, Chemung County is on the path to tracking the developmental progress of all children from birth to age 5. The project started years ago with school districts wanting to look at school readiness. They worked with Children's Institute to bring RECAP to Chemung County. With RECAP they looked at assessing social-emotional health and other domains for Pre-K students with a focus on getting kids ready for kindergarden.

Jump forward a few years, enter CIDS and their infant registration program. Because of the smaller size of their county and having only one hospital, CIDS was able to interact with the families each time a baby was born in their county. At the hospital, a nurse would ask the family a few simple questions and record data about the mother and the child's health. The County had a goal of wanting to connect all this information together - from birth to school age.

The group decided to use COMET because of our connection with the Chemung RECAP team, who were already using the system. Two years later we've rolled out a case management system that records when a child is born and tracks referrals that may be made to programs like Nurse-Family Partnership or Healthy Families. As the kids grow and enter Pre-K, the system will have all their data going back to that initial infant registration on the day they were born. That's pretty cool!

Click the links below to learn more about this project!

Case Study

Project Overview