Editorial: Data is important in Human Services, but so is humanity
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Westmoreland County is taking steps to serve people better, and it is doing it by the numbers.
The county’s Human Services Department amasses a lot of data from its daily operations. That’s to be expected with the amount of people who pass through its programs.
Human Services is an umbrella department. It is responsible for a wide range of interventions and protections. It oversees child welfare, mental and behavioral health and drug overdose prevention. In 2021, veterans and seniors also were placed under that umbrella.
The various areas account for almost a third of the county’s $456 million budget. It helps coordinate another $300 million in services from private and nonprofit agencies supporting Westmoreland residents. Altogether, the department spends or has its hands in about $450 million.
Want context for how much money that is? The combined payrolls of the big names and big paychecks of the Steelers, Pirates and Penguins are about $380 million.
The needs addressed by Human Services aren’t a game. They are serious and can save or change lives. But that doesn’t mean the resources are bottomless.
In sports, that can be addressed with predictive analytics — that’s the place where math turns a game into science by helping decide what players fit together into the best team for the optimum outcome. It’s most associated with baseball because of the book and movie “Moneyball.” It’s also used in insurance underwriting, investing and artificial intelligence.
And then there are the social-legal applications. That’s what Westmoreland County is doing with its wealth of data. The idea is to take individual slivers of information to reconstruct a mosaic that delivers a more complete picture — or a crystal ball.
“We want to be able to anticipate needs before it becomes a major problem. It will move us from a reactionary state to a preventative state,” Human Services Director Rob Hamilton said.
It’s something Allegheny County has been doing for years, using computers to take pressure off employees. It’s a way to prevent backlogs and connect dots. It could be the solution to something like deaths or “near deaths” of children in homes where drug use was a factor.
But there needs to be consideration. In 2022, the Associated Press obtained Carnegie Mellon University research of the Allegheny child protective services algorithm that pointed to a potential problem. Black children were calculated as triggering a mandatory investigation about 11% more frequently than white children during a 20-month period.
Any innovation with the potential for great good has to be approached with corresponding caution. The important thing is to remember the department provides human services, not analytics services.