Redesigning HSOC’s Client Engagement Form for Better Data Quality

City Partner: Health Streets Operation Center (HSOC) 
Pro Bono Partner: US Digital Response

The Healthy Streets Operations Center (HSOC) helps people living in large encampments (6+ tents) by offering them shelter, health and behavioral support services. The HSOC team needs accurate and complete client information to make data-informed client and system-level decisions. Accurate and standardized data is also integral to develop analytics and performance metrics to strategize and prioritize outreach methods based on previous performance.

HSOC partnered with US Digital Response (USDR) to refine the questions in its client encounter form to streamline the intake process, as well as update the form with fixed fields to standardize the data being collected.

Prior to this project, the HSOC client engagement process was manual, messy, and vulnerable to human error:

• The client intake process required outreach workers to fill out a 20+ question Microsoft Forms Survey for every client they encountered in the field.
• An analyst would then copy and paste the form’s raw data into a SharePoint excel sheet for cleaning.
• Many of the form’s fields were open input (as opposed to fixed/drop down), which led to a lack of standardization across the data collected.

The USDR volunteer team conducted user research with HSOC outreach workers and departmental partners to understand the challenges in the existing data intake process. Utilizing insights gleaned from their user research, the USDR volunteers developed a comprehensive stakeholder map of the form data. The journey map visually represented how different users throughout the data intake process were interacting with the data collected in the outreach form.

The key project goals identified through USDR’s user research and stakeholder mapping were:

• Automate data cleaning processes to reduce manual work.
• Optimize data formatting and reporting to facilitate easier analysis and answering of common policy questions.
• Improve data entry process by addressing issues with redundant questions and free-form answers.

After identifying these key goals, the USDR team conducted an audit of the existing form to identify potential opportunities for improvement in standardization. The main optimization areas identified were:

• Date
• Location
• Refusal/ Acceptance of shelter
• General form structure.

USDR developed two prototypes for a new, improved intake form. These prototypes focused on:

• User-friendliness
• Improved standardization of questions
• Data quality
• Mobile compatibility

With multiple ways to test a single problem area, the team decided to conduct a two-phased (A/B) test. The goals of testing various phases for form improvements were two-fold:

• Improve the overall quality of the data received so that Data Analysts could spend less time manually cleaning dirty data.
• Improve the overall user experience of the form to be less tedious for ERT members to fill out while in the field.

The form changes reduced the percentage of submissions containing dirty data from 15.38% to 2.49% — an 84% improvement.

Overall, the changes made during both Phase 1 and Phase 2 tests reduced the need for manual database cleanup. Though cleanup was still needed for the ‘Date’ and ‘Manually Entered Locations’, the addition of helper text and a fixed dropdown for Date and Location respectively significantly reduced the amount of cleaning needed.

The data intake standardization both directly improved the HSOC data quality being regularly uploaded into the ASTRID dataset, and provided scalable insights for other street team data leads to standardize and improve their own field data intake processes.