For those of you who may not know, Community Data Roundtable is an award-winning organization; I was recently featured on TCOM’s Tales from the Collaborative podcast and had the opportunity to chat with producer Tim Fall about my professional journey, which has led to receiving the TCOM Champions Award (you can listen to the 20 min episode here).
My professional background is community behavioral health with an existential approach. I firmly believe that you cannot reduce people to numbers, though my first position as an administrator required me to make constant decisions about 5,000 different people. And to do that, I needed more summary information about organization performance, programs, and levels of care.
I was already familiar and trained in CANS when I first heard John Lyons first speak. CANS didn’t quite click for me until John’s talk and from that experience I was able to comprehend the large scale TCOM picture. Flash forward to today, and CDR is able to build datasets that we use for decision support algorithms. We even recently published a paper on how advanced analytics can be used to evaluate CANS data and identify profiles that succeed or that suffer in a service so that we can start shaping client referral patterns for a better match.
CDR enjoys a rewarding relationship with the IPH Center at the University of Kentucky for the implementation of TCOM, which becomes increasingly relevant with today’s rising mental health crisis, greater economic pressures, and the growing need for community support. We need to look at data to solve these large-scale common problems. CDR is dedicated to promoting collaboration through multi-level data review and steering communities to action with data science.
We are working with CANS/ANSA/FAST implementations across the country, who have been collecting data for years to keep this data conversation going. We would love to hear your thoughts, on the podcast, data queries, or the human services landscape. Give the episode a listen and tell me what you think ([email protected])! Also, check out Tim’s work and other amazing guests featured on TCOM’s Tales from the Collaborative Podcast.