Between 1993 and 2011, Allegheny County Department of Human Services received three SAMHSA grants to implement systems of care designed to support youth with serious emotional disturbances who were involved in multiple child-serving systems. Evaluation was a critical piece of these grants, which prioritized family empowerment and inclusion.  In keeping with this priority, and its values, DHS involved families in evaluation in three ways: 1) family members were hired as evaluation staff; 2) family members served on evaluation committees; and 3) family members were provided training and technical assistance opportunities regarding training.  This report describes the experience, its challenges and rewards, and makes recommendations about ways to increase the success of such involvement by family members.

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This report summarizes the development, implementation and evaluation of a crisis intervention training program designed to teach police officers how to identify and intervene appropriately and safely with individuals with mental illness.

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This report describes Allegheny County’s criminal justice case review process, including factors that have contributed to its success and proposed solutions to ongoing issues.

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DHS’s Improving Outcomes for Child and Families initiative utilized a service integration focus to serve families with multiple needs.  It was based on the belief that making systems work together as a team would improve services and reduce the confusion that families face when they need to interact with staff from a variety of child-serving systems. Specifically, DHS believed that widespread service integration could further reduce the number and length of out-of-home child welfare placements.  This paper describes the objectives incorporated into the initiative and the process of implementation.

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Click here to view a related report, “Informing the Design of the DHS ‘Improving Outcomes for Children and Families Initiative.'”
This report informed the early planning efforts of the “Improving Outcomes” Initiative by analyzing child welfare placement data and trends in point-in time placement from the years 1996-2008.

Integrating Pittsburgh Public School (PPS) data with the Department of Human Services (DHS) Data Warehouse allows unprecedented collaboration between human services and school social workers. Our partnerships with local school districts have lead to a better understanding of the impact certain interventions have on children’s education. And they have provided the basis for richer analyses, which, in turn, helps us to identify areas of need and suggest new approaches to addressing them.

This report describes the process that led to the Memorandum of Understanding between DHS and local school districts.

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Click to read a one-page brief about the key aspects of the data-sharing partnership.

This report details the transformational administrative and operational changes within DHS from its creation in 1997 through 2010.

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This report describes the more than 100 quality improvement activities and initiatives taking place throughout DHS, using the Council on Accreditation’s (COA) Performance and Quality Improvement standards to frame the discussion of how DHS currently manages quality improvement. It discusses best practice approaches and provides benchmarking information about what organizations similar to DHS are doing, and was used to inform the development of DHS’s Quality Improvement unit.

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This paper, presented at the 28th Annual APPAM Research Conference in November 2006, describes the context and need for integrated data in human services, data warehousing technology and its unique challenges in the public sector, innovative data warehouse applications that have arisen in part from joint projects with universities, and future opportunities for data warehousing.

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With the creation of the Department of Human Services in 2007, Director Marc Cherna began the process of integrating the existing Departments of Aging, Federal Programs, Children and Youth Services and Mental Health/Mental Retardation/Drug & Alcohol/Homeless & Hunger Programs. The restructuring, which was the result of a lengthy internal planning process and public discussion, is discussed in this paper, and updated a year later in the related progress report.

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Click here to read a related progress report.