Tl:dr - External researchers using state health data for their research must request the data. Depending on the departments involved, the researchers must submit multiple, cumbersome applications and a lengthy review process which can delay their ability to publish. OI conducted a series of workshops to craft a single application form that works for both researchers and state reviewers for all CHHS departments. The more complete information gathered in the form helps speed review processes.

Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) - Common Application Workshop

OI Staff: Darci Delgado, Kim LaBonte
OI Director: Chaeny Emanavin
OSHPD Champion: Michael Valle

The Initial Problem

The Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) is the office responsible for ensuring hospital buildings are safe, providing financial assistance to individuals and healthcare institutions, and collecting and publishing healthcare data within the California Health & Human Services (CHHS)

CHHS’s Office of Innovation partnered with the OSHPD to streamline the process by which external researchers request departmental data. Historically our user community did not know which department kept the data they needed. Thus, they had to fill out multiple requests forms and go through several different review processes to gain access to data resources. The process was time-consuming and confusing. Sometimes important research projects were not able to be completed because of these delays.

Discovery

This was the Office of Innovation’s first engagement using the “mini-engagement” model. This model is useful when the problem is already more well defined or limited to a particular scope. In this case, the effort was focused on streamlining the form researchers use to request data so one document contains all the elements needed to request data from any CHHS department. Instead of a typical eight week cycle, this project was a series of individual interviews and group workshops over a four-week period.

We sought input from the user community, interviewing sixteen external researchers and state departmental staff to record pain points and opportunities for streamlining the external research request process. Pain Points included: Available data is unknown, duplicative processes, process is too time consuming, privacy and security concerns, software problems, difficulty obtaining data, and bottlenecks with processing requests. Opportunities include: create a common application, streamline the process, partnering strategy with universities, messaging, privacy and security, and create a knowledge management platform.

New Challenge Statement

To positively impact these challenges we posed the question, “How might we create a common application for external researchers to request CHHS data faster, easier, and according to appropriate laws and rules”

Prototyping & Deliverables

The OI process allowed the team to overcome the challenge with several tools at our disposal. During discovery we held Workshop 1: “Creating a Common Application” - Oct. 22, 2018 - Twenty-two state staff attended representing: CPHS, DHCS, DSH, OSHPD, CDPH, BioBank, Cancer Registry and VSAC. - The goal was to deconstruct individual applications, identify commonalities, and create common application drafted in real time. The Prototype of CHHS Common Application was emailed to participants for feedback and further iteration.

Workshop 2: “Creating a Knowledge Platform” - Nov. 1, 2018 - Five university researchers and twenty state staff attended and user tested the new CHHS Common Application. All participants brainstormed in sessions on creating an ideal CHHS Data Sharing platform and their feedback was included in another improved iteration of the product.

The prototypes included feedback from all seven departments/divisions and user testing from external researchers. We user tested it, and iterated on it twice two before refining to the final version. The resulting form contains all necessary elements for researchers to request the data needed from any CHHS data source. The new form was universally praised for its improved user-friendliness for both requesters and reviewers. The more complete information will greatly speed the review process and help researchers use data to create insight to benefit both academia and practical implementation of those insights.

What you can use in your Department

• The common application design will serve as a template to re-engineer department processes and configure software to make it easier for researchers to request data
• The process of interviewing key stakeholders and then convening workshops to co-create solutions is a powerful and effective way to improve service delivery

Quotable Quotes

This was a great experience! There was a lot of positive energy in the group of departmental contacts and we would encourage using this group to keep the momentum going on this project.