Los Angeles County has been building systems that harness data to integrate records and service use of residents into one centralized and mobile app.
The goal is to make information available countywide, allowing all departments to deliver better services.
Mark Greninger, chief data officer for the county, is leading the effort to improve service coordination, data-driven decision-making and data integration through technical components such as application programming interfaces (APIs) and extract, transform and load capabilities.
While the county is focused on service delivery now, the hope is to integrate more systems together, especially financial and operational information, to ease data-driven decisions in the future. Greninger wants to use a centralized system to access that information to build a system that looks into cost of initiatives and fraud detection.
This has led to an information hub project that has integrated apps that also allow other services, such as a child abuse investigation app and a homelessness services app. The homelessness services app will require more integration in future rollouts.
"Our information hub — or the data hub, as our bosses call it sometimes — is a broader concept which is to enable information to flow where it's needed, when it's needed," Greninger told Techwire. "The underpinning of that is three primary parts of that: One is the development of a master person index — identifying common clients we have within the county; a data storage component, where we bring an authoritative service history; and the third platform is data integration."
The master person index should be rolled out by January, with secure but accessible information. It is a shared project with funding coming from many departments, but Greninger's office handles contracts and cost recovery for the almost $2 million project.
"Our master person index is built using the IBM MDM, master data management," Greninger said. "That master data management comes with a set of Web services built in, adding people to that master person index, searching that master person index and getting information from that system."
