Johnson County/State HHS Breakthrough Team is launched
The Kansas Collaborative has another new Breakthrough Team effort underway…this one in Health and Human Services (HHS) in partnership with the Governor’s HHS Cabinet Team and Johnson County. The Johnson County/State HHS Breakthrough Team officially launches on September 26th, though a number of strategy meetings have already taken place.
Team purpose: To explore opportunities for coordinating human services within Johnson County provided to individuals and families by state agencies, local governments and non-profit organizations for the purpose of increasing client and client family success; To share lessons learned, information sharing models, and service delivery models with other counties or groups in Kansas.
How this team started: At a Strategic Information Management (SIM) Plan focus group we were facilitating this spring, Hannes Zacharias (Johnson County’s Deputy County Manager) mentioned the work they were doing to build a GIS based map of HHS services, linked to United Way 211 data, and their exploratory work to create a common HHS client database. Hannes also stated that he was interested in being a pilot site for innovative projects. As you would expect from The Kansas Collaborative, we followed up to see how to leverage these points of innovation.
The Johnson County/State HHS Breakthrough Team is sponsored both by the HHS Cabinet Team and Johnson County’s Human Services Coalition. We believe this effort will break ground in helping local/state HHS information systems “talk” to one another so dual entry becomes a “thing of the past” and caseworkers receive a more comprehensive picture of the client and their family so client success is increased. As we have learned in the collaborative, innovation that happens closest to the point of service delivery has the greatest chance of helping the citizens it serves. When this innovation is supported by the state, it has a greater chance of being leveraged and sustained.
We wish to thank Hannes Zacharias for sharing his vision, the HHS Cabinet Team and their agency staff for their support and SRS Secretary Don Jordan for funding this Breakthrough Team.
Look for a workshop and additional information at The Kansas Collaborative booth at the KAC Annual Conference, November 16 – 18 in Wichita.
Until next month…
Kathleen and Joel
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