Data & Analytics for County Governments
Data and Analytics for County Governments
Cross-departmental reporting, outcome measurement, and data sharing that respects confidentiality rules.
A county board asks how many residents the county served last year and gets a different answer from every department, because health, human services, and justice each count people differently and none of them can legally hand over raw records. Useful county analytics starts with the confidentiality rules, not with the dashboard.
What county data looks like
- Eligibility, case management, and clinical systems with distinct confidentiality regimes
- Justice data spanning sheriff, probation, courts, and the district attorney
- Property and financial data in assessor, recorder, and auditor systems
- Program reporting obligations to state and federal funders, each with its own definitions
- Departments that have built their own reporting in isolation, often in spreadsheets
Where HQT helps
- A governed data platform with separation and access controls appropriate to each data type, so regulated data can be analyzed without being pooled improperly
- Agreed definitions and a metric dictionary, so that board reports and department reports agree
- Automated state and federal program reporting, replacing hand-assembled submissions
- Outcome measurement across programs, using privacy-preserving techniques where records cannot be combined directly
- Public transparency dashboards with suppression rules applied automatically
- Data quality feedback loops to the staff who enter the records
How an engagement usually starts
Usually with one department's reporting problem or a board request that nobody can answer quickly. We involve county counsel and privacy staff in the design rather than at the end, because the legal boundaries determine the architecture.