Confidentiality Issues

Seminar title: "Putting Information Together: Building Integrated Data Repositories"

Date and place: Wednesday, February 9, 2000, University at Albany

Speaker: Robert Dawes, Director, Bureau of Shelter Services, NYS Office of Temporary & Disability Assistance

Transcript of video and audio clip

We ran into many problems along the road. This is an example to give you an idea of the type of problems we had; first thing off the bat was confidentiality. Who will have access to the information, will this information be misinterpreted along the road?

Well, to deal with that issue, it kind of hit me, it wasn’t one that I was ready for.

Although I heard it on the Anchor implementation, confidentiality to me was—we dealt with tons of client-related data in the previous Department of Social Services from—the Medicaid right on through every possible level of SSI clients and all types of public assistance information.

So it was a non-issue to me, but it was a big issue to my shelter providers. They were worried that this information would be used by the wrong people.

The questions were, well after we give it to you what are you going to do with it? What do you think I’m going to do with it, I’m going to use it for the positive for everyone.

Well that’s not the good answer. The answer is - okay we have to worry about that issue, we have to address it. So right off the bat, we got all of the department regs., laws, protocols and mailed them out.

I talked to the Commissioner, I said this is a big issue to the people out there. He looked at me and said well why and I explained why.

So he signed a letter back to the Technology Committee explaining our process and how we safeguard and how we are required by law and regulation to safeguard the data.

That’s a big thing. Right off the bat it was done quickly and done by the top guy. That shows our faith end of it. We set up a system whereby we talked about how each shelter would have access to only their data, of their clients.

Everyone would have access to the aggregate data we derived, but if you send in information you can get the information back on your clients, but not on someone else’s clients.