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.

Exciting news - there’s a new report in COMET!  It’s called the TCRS Percentile Report and is located under tabs Admin > Instruments reports.  Look in the section ‘Group Data Reports’ – it’s the last report on the list.

Why is it there?  We heard from multiple Primary Project teams that wanted a Pre/Post report that actually focused on students in the domains with pre percentiles at or below the 30th percentile – children ‘At Risk’ (16th to 30th) and at ‘High Risk’ (0 to 15th). 

What does it (or can it) do?  When selecting Primary Project participants, the TCRS is used as a tool to help facilitate this process. Typically children with one or more scores in the ‘At Risk’ area are selected.  This report allows you to see the pre/post results by domain (Task Orientation, Behavior Control, Assertiveness, Peer Social) for only those children.  Students above the 30th percentile not presenting needs aren’t included.  The report defaults to showing graphs for all domains with a percentile range from 0 to 30.  Like other reports, you can filter on:  School, Grade, and Group (such as Cycle 1 or Cycle 2).  In addition, one or all domains can be selected and the percentile range can be modified. You might want to see only children falling between the 15th and 30th percentiles. It’s your choice!  Another nice feature of this report is it lists the students along with their pre, post, and difference scores. 

Another request we heard was for a One Time report that only lists children falling in the ‘At Risk’ range to help in the selection process.  The report does this also!  For example, after you screen in the fall, select ‘One Time’ in the filter and the date range screening occurred – e.g., 10/1 to 10/30.  The report defaults to listing all students that fall at or below the 30th percentile in any domain.  Again, the percentile range can be adjusted. 

We hope you find this report useful, possibly in other ways than what’s mentioned above. 

Primary Project is a national evidence-based program that helps children in Pre-K through third grade adjust to school, gain confidence, social skills, and focus on learning. Begun in 1957, Primary Project is the foundational program of Children’s Institute. Schools who implement Primary Project use COMET to screen children in the early grades and identify those who may benefit from the program, they then complete pre-post assessments on COMET to monitor progress and report on results. Having the assessment tools available online, as opposed to paper, has increased response rates up to 98% and reduced turn-out time for results from weeks to instantly!

Written by our not-for-profit partner, Children's Institute.

Original Posting 24.01.18

Here at COMET we’re lucky to have a not-for-profit partner who understands all the ins and outs of program evaluation, Children’s Institute (CI). They evaluate their own programs regularly, to make sure they’re effective and keeping up with best practices. They also work with many organizations in the Rochester community as an independent evaluator for their programs. Many of those organizations are also COMET customers, utilizing our system to collect the data used in their evaluations.

Time and again we hear from customers that the value of having CI function as an independent evaluator of their programs is so valuable. Because we work with a lot of not-for-profits, we understand that role that data and evaluation play in terms of reporting to funders; sometimes it takes more than just data to make a point, sometimes you need to show that the data was looked at without bias. One of the key benefits of working with an independent evaluator is being able to both understand your impact, but also communicate it with confidence.

“When we use words like ‘statistically significant’ and ‘independent evaluator’ we gain credibility. Not only can we answer questions about the impact we’re making, we do so with confidence that the results are accurate and meaningful. That goes a long way with our supporters.”

Data collection and evaluation can feel like daunting tasks but with a partner who's experienced and supportive it becomes manageable. The COMET and Children's Institute teams believe in the power and value of good data and the impact those have on being able to improve outcomes for kids. Knowing what programs are working, and which ones are not, replicating effective models and moving away from those that don't show results are important when your goal is helping children find their path and be successful.

To learn more about how one of our customers has successfully worked with CI as an independent evaluator, click here.

Still thinking about evaluation? Click here to learn about the key first step in any evaluation.

Original Posting 15.03.18

We thought it might help to provide an overview on data available in COMET because who doesn't love to talk about data?! [wink, wink] But seriously, COMET is fundamentally "child centric", meaning that the system is designed to record data that serve or relate to the child. (e.g.: Mother of Birth, Father of Birth, Household Environment, Primary Care Provider). However, the breadth of data we can store related to a child is wide and comes in many forms.

"Operational" Data Elements: These elements support the overall operation of an organization or program. Examples of these elements include when an email was sent to a parent, the date of the next visit, membership or service dues collected. They are often relevant for only a short time and of value primarily for operational purposes.

Only One Value per Child; No Change Tracking: These are data elements - such as Last Name, First Name or Date of Birth - that are unique for the child and for which change-tracking is not required. For example, First Name may have been entered with a spelling mistake an then fixed. We do not track the change nor store the incorrect prior entry. COMET has about a dozen of these fields.

Only One Value per Child; Track Changes: These are data elements - such as Address or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) eligibility - that have a static value for a given child at a given date but may change often. We want to be able to view the history of changes for that field, but primarily access the current value. COMET has over 150 of these fields

Multiple Values per Child: These are data elements that may have multiple entries for a child - such as Family Relationships, Contacts, Consents, Vaccination Records. Depending upon each client configuration, COMET manages multiple active/inactive and current/history records associated with each. 

Multiple Values per Child with History of Changes / Instruments: These represent entities that have multiple occurrences for a given child for which we are interested in viewing the change over a period of time (pre/post analysis, longitudinal, etc.). In addition to the data elements collected when completing a response, these instruments are often associated with an assessment. Some assessments are "normalized" (they follow a norm, often authoritative) or "standardized" (statistically position the child against their peers). Assessments are key for monitoring individual progress, informing the practice and measuring individual impact in a continuous improvement model. They are also the base for program evaluations for example, assessing a group of children that has received a service in comparison to a group that has not.

Let us know if this was helpful or contact us if you have more questions.

Looking for more tips on data management? Check out this blog post about Chronic Spreadsheet Fatigue.

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

Original Posting 16.01.19

One of the most exciting developments to come from COMET is happening - The COMET Parent Portal! We have a beta version in production and one special customer, GROW Rochester, who is in a pilot rollout phase. We also have secured funding to develop phase 2 of the portal with some exciting additional features - the ability for parents to complete assessments through the portal, a messaging system, the ability to view attendance records, and much more!

The COMET Team is really excited about this project. It's been in design over the last couple years, and now with the pilot we can begin to demonstrate that connecting with parents can make all the difference in the effectiveness of programs. We hope this parent portal will serve as one way for our customers to bridge the gap between home and school, or between home and afterschool. All the research and best practices agree, connecting with parents is critical and truly makes a difference.

We hope you're excited as we are. The parent portal isn't just a new population for us to connect with, we're focused on using new design and technology as well as mobile development, with lots more new things to come. For now, all we can say is that we're diligently working on it, but as timelines for a general rollout are developed we'll be sure to let all our customers know. In the meantime, connect with your Account Manager if you're interested in learning more ASAP - maybe we can arrange a sneak peek for you! Just email support@comet4children.com.