Integrating Data to Support Citywide COVID-19 Response

As part of its work, the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (NYC Opportunity) develops and manages data services to help the City’s health and human service agencies be more coordinated, effective, and tech-enabled.

The past year has required an unprecedented level of collaboration to handle emergencies and support marginalized communities that have been hit hardest by the pandemic. As early as March 2020, many public servants found themselves on the frontline of a global public health crisis as the City’s network of agencies, hospitals, and community-based organizations faced the double crises of managing an increasingly strained healthcare system and mitigating the growing fallout of an economy in freefall.

During periods of dire emergency, a person, family, or business may need a variety of supports from multiple programs managed by various agencies and systems. Developing a single data management system that perfectly meets all needs can be expensive, complex, and time-consuming. For those in need, the use of a single system or seamless connection across systems can potentially limit encounters with duplicate program requirements, conflicting directives or gaps in service that may not be known to any one program or case manager.

To enable better cross-agency coordination, NYC Opportunity is using its data integration platform to support more coordinated and effective service outreach and delivery. A data integration platform can be used to connect data from multiple client information systems and share critical data back to those systems with full consideration towards individual privacy. A data integration platform used this way, ideally, should have the capability to:

1. legally and securely receive, store, and organize information vital for coordinated service outreach;
2. support privacy-preserving (or “privacy-first”) approaches that minimize disclosure of sensitive information and support record anonymization;
3. enable robust master data management to match, link, and merge vital information about an individual or family captured in multiple systems;
4. create system-to-system connections with web services and APIs to allow seamless information exchanges that enhance service delivery; and
5. allow fast querying and analysis to identify and screen potential populations across millions of cases that may be eligible for programs or benefits they are not currently receiving;

As the City took action at the very onset of the pandemic, NYC Opportunity’s data integration and analytics services have been used to, among other things, support phone outreach to elderly and low-income residents, coordinate the daily delivery of free meals and streamline eligibility reviews for specialized COVID-19 relief programs. Given the right focus, a data integration platform provides rapid assistance to separate operations so that workers at the front-line — case manager, call center operator, food delivery truck driver — are given the information to provide residents the support they need when they need them most.