Blog

New York State Confidentiality Toolkit Developed to Assist with Cross System Information Sharing

New York State continues in its efforts toward interoperability and toward using technology to improve services to its citizens, especially those most vulnerable and in need of public intervention to reach independence.  The New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) – under the leadership of former Commissioner Gladys Carrion, former OCFS CIO Bill […]

Toward Seamless Information & Referral: A Polycentric Experiment

By Derek Coursen, Adjunct Faculty, NYU Wagner School of Public Service                            Multiple levels of government and a myriad of nonprofit organizations offer an ever-changing array of specialized services to people who need them. But who directs traffic through all that complexity?The work of connecting people to services is known as information and referral. It’s a […]

Our 9th Annual Symposium: Reflections on the Possible

At the end of our three-day symposium at Johns Hopkins University earlier this month, I asked the attendees to describe their experience in just one word. Here’s a representative sampling of what we heard: “Exciting.” “Energizing.” “Thought-provoking” (is that one word?). “Insightful.” And my personal favorite: “Inspiring.” All of us at the Stewards of Change […]

Health Datapalooza: A Call to Improve Care Through Open Health Data

By Dwayne Spradlin, CEO, Health Data Consortium —   Great strides have been made in the public availability and use of health data, but we still have a long way to go in our efforts to improve health care in the United States. At the center of the efforts of the Health Data Consortium is […]

The convergence of justice, human services, and health care

In 2006, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that “At midyear 2005 more than half of all prison and jail inmates had a mental health problem, including 705,600 inmates in State prisons, 78,800 in Federal prisons, and 479,900 in local jails.These estimates represented 56% of State prisoners, 45% of Federal prisoners, and 64% of jail […]

First Health and Human Services Open DataFest

Stewards of Change Institute is proud to announce the first health and human service Open DataFest, taking place in Sacramento, California January 21st and 22nd.  The purpose of this symposium is to build broad awareness, knowledge and utilization of open data in general, but more specifically within health and human services across California. Working in […]

The Latest Revolution

Throughout the developed world, and at all levels of government, the latest explosive innovation linked to government use of IT is the rush to make government data open. Particularly in larger cities in the U.S. and Europe, state and local governments are finding more and more datasets never heretofore made public and are publishing these new […]