A large Minnesota county’s Health and Human Services (HHS) department provides a wide variety of services to many county residents consistent with other counties in Minnesota. Services include housing support, child welfare, and home and community-based care.
Leaders in the HHS department wanted to increase the ability to access and use data to improve operational efficiency and planning, thereby lowering administrative costs and improving service.
The department uses a combination of manual and automated systems in the execution of its work, including the Social Services Information System (SSIS) provided by the state and manually created Excel spreadsheets. These systems were difficult to get useful information out of, were not synchronized and were unwieldy to update. There was no centralized store of data that leaders could use in analytics and reporting. They were facing a common situation for many other counties: siloed data.
Superior Consulting Services built a reporting and analytics solution using the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack, including data extraction and transformation processes and Power BI dashboards, allowing the HHS staff to comprehensively view and analyze data. As a large county, the number of residents served was also large. This meant that this arduous, manual process without synchronization sucked up a lot of the staff’s time.
