EVIDENCE-BASED POLICYMAKING: Family Success Lab
New Mexico lacks the basic infrastructure to make evidence-based decisions on how to best address the generational cycles of instability, poverty, and chaos. There is a wealth of administrative data and a dearth of tools to operationalize the data. There is no governance infrastructure for data sharing across state agencies and there is little use of data within agencies to provide feedback on program efficacy. Policymaking and service delivery are done in vacuums, without evaluation or outcomes baked into funding, resulting in lost dollars and lost time for families. Low-cost randomized controlled trials using administrative data to evaluate programs, interventions, and policies are virtually impossible.
Families bouncing between multiple social services systems (“multi-system families”) have each of their co-occurring factors dealt with by different agencies. Their care is based on triage and not prevention. They often spend their weeks meeting the requirements of each agency, whose case management process and data is completely divorced from those of other agencies. Different agencies that treat members of the same family do not connect the data to understand the entire family’s constellation of problems or see patterns when looking at larger groups of families. The result of this lack of data sharing and collaboration between agencies is that there is no way to accurately describe or understand who is at risk for what, who gets what spectrum of services, and whether or not those services worked as intended.
The mission of the Family Success Lab is to use integrated administrative data to discover and deploy evidence-based, data-informed and scalable solutions to common challenges facing vulnerable children and families. The Lab will link historical, record level, administrative data across state agencies, which will be anonymized before it is shared with agency staff or researchers. Linked data offers significantly more granularity in understanding key risk factors for poor outcomes and evaluating how a program may have affected participants. Integrated data can be used to identify risk and protective factors to better assess family strengths and challenges, target evidence-based programs to high-risk groups, and evaluate programs, policies, and interventions for efficacy and cost.
Work on this endeavor continues to progress. New Mexico Appleseed secured $50,000 in funding for DOH during the 2019 legislative session for the agency to hire a data linkage epidemiologist. The epidemiologist was hired at the end of 2019. DOH has devoted more resources to this initiative, which has support from many staff because of its potential to better understand family outcomes and address the root causes of poor outcomes. Other agencies have also begun to recognize the value of this endeavor, including PED and ECECD. The current work includes determining the initial research questions to show proof of concept, identifying existing state resources that can be leveraged for the Family Success Lab, and developing the governance structure to share data, so staff resources are not continually devoted to re-negotiating MOUs for each data sharing effort. Appleseed is participating in the process by sharing our extensive knowledge of integrated data systems and convening key stakeholders to help bring all partners along in the process.