Can We Place A Value On Social Service Outcomes?
Buffalo may not know that, by nature, they are contributing to the economy of healthy prairies. These majestic mammals munch their way across natural landscapes in slow herds, shearing the grass and stimulating healthy plant growth. Their saliva contains enzymes to activate root growth. And their manure brings rich nutrients back into the soil, helping to perpetuate a balanced ecosystem. Holy cow, how much is a healthy ecosystem worth?
Similarly, people also contribute to the economy. And while lots of measurements (the nation’s GDP, for example, or the S&P 500) give part of the picture, it’s harder to quantify the return on investment for things like education, policing, addiction treatment, reentry services, subsidized housing, and student loan forgiveness.
In this article, we’ll look at two things:
How government agencies and nonprofits try to assess the impact of public investments in services to the community and,
Is this methodology getting us anywhere? Is there a better way to think about the health of a community, and perhaps other ways to measure it?
For decades, social service agencies have been collecting data to measure the well-being of any defined population. Organizations use some or all of the following standardized tests, to assess the need of individual clients as well as their progress over time:
ACEs (adverse childhood experiences)
Self Sufficiency Scale
The Strengthening Families Protective Factors
Hope Scale
While any feedback from these is better than none, how information has traditionally been gathered seems to have impacted the rate of progress. And it also appears that the way organizations interact, or don’t interact, also impedes improvement.
So here’s what we have identified and are now putting into place:
“The people who are receiving service are now being involved as a member of their care team,” said Josh Graves, CEO of Catholic Community Services. “They are invited to participate in setting the priorities and goals, as well as providing information about the change over time.”
“In the past, the service was about the individual, or around the individual, and not including the individual,” added Graves, whose social service agency is at the forefront of client-centric organizational change in the Mid-Willamette Valley.
“We’re beginning to measure not just the direct care the client receives from an organization, but also the value of ‘natural’ or non-clinical support. Increasingly, grassroots, volunteer support is seen as equally significant as the clinical,” he said.
“Health Information Exchanges provide a way in which the client’s information is shared among networked organizations,” Graves continued. “In the past, the physical, behavioral, and social practitioners never interacted. That created hardship for the client, because each time they have to retell their story, there’s a risk of retraumatizing them.”
Employing software, like Activate Care, helps create ease for the client and efficiency for the collective effort to improve the lives of individuals. “These things dramatically improve the quality of care, reduce duplication and stress, and thus speed the process of reaching the client’s goal.
Using the analogy of Buffalo grazing, the old way of siloed organization and duplicated testing and data analysis efforts would be more like a fenced stockyard, an unnatural setting in which every animal is treated the same. The saving on land use is lost because of the added cost of care. Employing the newer strategy of a cooperating network of cross-functional organizations, all using the same Health Information Exchange, each client is deciding their path, and what service is most valuable at the moment to satisfy their need.
Comparing the outcomes, the penned-up, one-size-fits-all versus the more natural, prairie-grazing, you can measure the value in the amount of time a client continues to receive service. You can measure it in how self-sufficient they are, how much hope they have, and how much they are contributing to their family and the community.