Calgary community services to begin sharing data, promising ‘more reliable support’ to vulnerable clients

After a pilot phase, Calgary’s frontline non-profits will soon begin sharing data to enable more robust service delivery to the city’s most vulnerable populations. 

An individual in crisis seeking services from multiple Calgary social services will be able to share their story once, rather than multiple times with each service provider. 

The Calgary Community Information Exchange (CIE) is led by Distress Centre Calgary and will include social services organizations like CUPS Calgary, Kindred Connections Society, and the Calgary Homeless Foundation. 

City and government staff, including Calgary Police and local transit officers, will also have access to an inference of the system. Still, that access will not include information about a full client record or case management capacity, said Richard Mugford, director of community information and data systems at Distress Centre Calgary. 

CIEs are common models in the United States. Individuals can opt in to having their data shared between agencies, and consent is a key part of the system, Mugford added. 

“We are working in a siloed manner, and that is negatively impacting the people we serve,” he said. Individuals are often registered with multiple programs and agencies, such as housing, health, addictions services, or food banks. They’re all crucial to supporting the person’s overall wellbeing journey, but agencies lack a full picture of who else is supporting them without adequate data-sharing mechanisms. 

Organizations have leaned on Converge’s Information Sharing Framework to support their data-sharing efforts. Meanwhile, Mugford also found that several organizations were still using systems that did not easily enable data sharing. 

“The number of legacy systems, the number of systems in our [non-profit] community that are not interoperable, and then trying to figure out another way to become interoperable […] has become a little bit of a conundrum to solve,” he said. 

The CIE project received seed funding through a grant from the Government of Alberta, and additional funding from United Way Calgary and the City of Calgary. 

More recently, Distress Centre Calgary announced that the Calgary Foundation had selected them for a major, $1 million grant to specifically support the growth and development of the CIE project. 

Now, Distress Centre Calgary and partners will seek sustainable, long-term government funding to expand the CIE into a province-wide system.