Across the country, supervision and pretrial agencies are being called upon to demonstrate how the work they are doing is effective and defensible. Data – especially quality data – can support the work you and your staff do. However, how do you know that your data is of high quality? What constitutes “quality” when it comes to data? Terms like accurate, consistent, reliable, and robust come to mind.
If conducting a data quality check-up is on your list of enhancements for the New Year, some fundamental questions to consider include:
1) Are you capturing the essential data points that fulfill the obligations of your department? Once you are aware of what data needs to be pulled and reported on in your department, assess when and how those data points should be collected and stored without adding work to your existing processes. A robust software solution, customized for your agency’s needs, can make data collection, extraction, and reporting painless.
2) If not, what gaps exist, and why? Are there data elements that, if available, would make your job more streamlined, effective, and impactful? Would adding a field to collect a certain piece of information during a workflow process solve the problem? Does this gap require more complex aggregation and reporting to fulfill? Working with your software solution’s team to ensure it is working for you can save your staff time.
3) If you are capturing the important pieces, how do you access, report on, and analyze that data? Having the data is one thing; being able to pull it in a useful way is another – and both are important. Ensure your reporting solutions prioritize information access so that all data that is vital to the successful management of caseloads and treatment of clients is readily available.
4) What checks and balances are in place to verify the accuracy of your data? Do you have workflows in place to check? Do you have access to a research department through your software provider to help you think through validity and other issues around data verification and accuracy?
5) How does your data system allow you to report your data to reflect trends and demonstrate agency needs to other system stakeholders? Ask if you have access to pre-built, user-friendly interfaces that put the most vital information on dashboards so users can see it at a glance every time they sign in. The flexibility of your system is important – and empowers agencies to create ad-hoc data extracts in just moments via user-friendly menus, filters, and selection tools – ensuring information is there when and as needed. The quality of the outputs is directly linked to the quality of the inputs – especially in this day and age. Capturing the right data points and reporting on them effectively is crucial.
In this New Year, we at equivant Supervision and Pretrial encourage you to review the questions posed above and identify what is working well and what improvements can be made. If your current data processes and software system is not fulfilling your needs, this might be the year to take a tour of the equivant Supervision Northpointe Suite to better understand the many ways our solutions can help you collect, extract, and report on quality data with confidence.
