Policy & Practice | Fall 2023

from our partners

By Lauren Hirka

The Power of Insight: Extracting Data to Inform Decisions

I t’s a long-established challenge in human services that workers spend too much time collecting, entering, and verifying clients’ data, but not enough time using it to inform decisions and actions. The same goes for agency leaders who have a trove of valuable information buried in their systems that collect data for compliance. A few years ago, Brunswick County Department of Social Services (DSS) in North Carolina recognized an opportunity to turn their input into insight. Leveraging our software, Traverse®, they set out to identify creative ways to classify, organize, and extract important data to support program goals and outcomes, in addition to reporting to the state. Today, this work has inspired a full suite of reports that are built into the software for every customer to leverage. Now all agencies that use Traverse can unlock data that not only support compliance, but also allow them to identify trends, prioritize work, and allocate resources. Partnership with Brunswick County DSS Shortly after Brunswick County DSS began using Traverse, we started working together to better understand how we could evolve the software to support their reporting needs. Rich Ohmer, social work program administrator at Brunswick County DSS, previously had to maintain multiple spreadsheets, access data bases, and reports provided by the state to find and gather the informa tion he needed. Data often weren’t

agency to manage all their reporting needs with Traverse instead of having to open and log into other systems. Beyond the custom reports they created, there are more than 40 additional reports in the module that provide even more insight based on all the data in the system. “To be able to use everything we put into that system without having to duplicate it with all these other spreadsheets is fantastic,” Ohmer said. “It saves a lot of time and it’s more accurate.” Brunswick County DSS Social Services Director Cathy Lytch says the real-time availability of the data is most beneficial. “We have all this

available until a month later, which made it hard to accurately report on key statistics or use the information to inform decisions in real time. Now, Ohmer can quickly find the data he needs within Traverse. He initially worked with county IT to develop seven unique reports that pull from Traverse data, including data entered directly into forms, and then connected the county’s existing reporting tools to a replica database of Traverse to build them. Northwoods is currently working with Brunswick County DSS to move all seven reports into a recently launched reporting module of Traverse. This move will allow the

Illustration by Chris Campbell

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Policy & Practice Fall 2023