Many individuals receive human services from multiple organizations that do not share records. This is often true even if those services are overseen and funded by the same local agency.
Sharing records across services can improve the quality of the services provided to individual recipients and programs as a whole:
- The recipient: Giving a case worker records from multiple services can enhance their understanding of the recipient and how to serve them. Even sharing basic profile information (e.g., name and address) can make it easier to enroll recipients in new services and find them if they move.
- The program: Program administrators can analyze records from many recipients to learn about the overall system and how to improve services for everyone. Researchers can use records to select participants for studies and evaluate the long-term effectiveness and impact of different services.
However, sharing records across services can raise many legitimate privacy concerns. For example, sharing records might violate a legal requirement or a recipient’s expectations for privacy. The resources below discuss how to responsibly navigate the privacy challenges that often arise when trying to share human services and similar administrative records for programmatic, management, and research purposes.
Featured OPRE Resources:
- Responsibly Sharing Confidential Data: Tools and Recommendations
- A Guide for Using Administrative Data to Examine Long-Term Outcomes in Program Evaluation
- Child and Caregiver Outcomes Using Linked Data (CCOULD): Linking Child Welfare and Medicaid Data
- Data Direction 5: Linking data to understand children’s academic progress from early care and education through elementary school (PDF) [with HHS/Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation]
- Linking Administrative Data to Improve Understanding of Child Maltreatment Incidence and Related Risk and Protective Factors: A Feasibility Study
- Expanding TANF Program Insights: A Toolkit for State and Local Agencies on How to Access, Link, and Analyze Unemployment Insurance Wage Data
Featured ACF Resources:
- Data Sharing Between TANF and Child Welfare Agencies (TANF-ACF-IM-2015-02) [Office of Family Assistance]
- Data Sharing for Courts and Child Welfare Agencies [Children’s Bureau]
- Toolkit: Data Sharing for Child Welfare Agencies and Medicaid (PDF) [Children’s Bureau]
Featured non-ACF Federal Resources:
- Guidance for Providing and Using Administrative Data for Statistical Purposes (M-14-06) (PDF) [OMB]
- Health Information Privacy [HHS/Office for Civil Rights]
- Protecting Student Privacy [DoEd/Student Privacy Policy Office]
- Sharing Data While Protecting Privacy (M-11-02) (PDF) [OMB]
- Writing Guide for a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) (PDF) [DHS]
Other Publications:
- Data System Improvement Toolkit Module 3: Protecting Data Ownership and Privacy (PDF) [Tribal Evaluation Institute]
- Federal Statistics, Multiple Data Sources, and Privacy Protection: Next Steps [National Academies]
- Innovations in Federal Statistics: Combining Data Sources While Protecting Privacy [National Academies]
- Using Linked Census, Survey, and Administrative Data to Assess Longer-Term Effects of Policy: Proceedings of a Workshop [National Academies]
Please contact datagov@acf.hhs.gov for any questions or comments about this page.