Can Protected Data Be Shared to Improve Services?
From: Government Executive
By John Kamensky IBM Center for the Business of Government
“Start with what you have,” is the advice consultants recommend to organizations that are just launching performance measurement initiatives. Now the Office of Management and Budget has issued guidance encouraging agencies to use existing program data in new ways.
The Obama administration has championed open data by encouraging agencies to make a wider range of statistical information available to the public. The philosophy is “information is a valuable national resource and strategic asset.” To that end, OMB has issued directives and created Data.gov, a centralized website for public data.
But what about administrative data that cannot be publicly shared because of privacy or security reasons? Agencies collect and use administrative data for the basic operations of government programs. For good reason, government records of individuals’ tax, Social Security earnings, health insurance and other benefit information cannot and should not be shared publicly. In fact, there are strict laws in place to safeguard these kinds of data.
Sharing Non-Public Data
Can protected data at least be shared between federal agencies — if stripped of individual identifiers — so they can be used to improve services? So far, this has been difficult. Each agency has been left to interpret whether it can share its data, and under what circumstances.
Laws allow certain kinds of sharing, but in many cases, constraints — real or perceived — have meant that one agency has to survey individuals or businesses for information that has already been collected by another agency. This has resulted in costly and duplicative efforts for government, businesses and citizens.
During the past five years, OMB has advocated sharing statistical information among agencies for evidence-based analyses that support better program decisions — without new and costly data collection efforts. The Housing and Urban Development, for example, has worked with the Veterans Affairs Department to share data about homeless veterans to better target services. This joint effort has reduced veteran homelessness by 25 percent since 2010.
OMB’s New Guidance
