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Health department outlines Gelato data links and plans for multi-year evaluation of diversion programs
Summary
Malora Christensen described Gelato interfaces with EMS and jail bookings, recent data-sharing agreements with prosecutor, police and 911, and an upcoming multi-year evaluation contract to assess how response-system programs interact and affect system outcomes.
Malora Christensen of the Response Systems Division told the task force on April 20 that the county is building integrated data infrastructure to measure the impact of diversion and response programs.
"We use a vendor and a platform called Gelato for all of our documentation," Christensen said. Gelato currently interfaces with county EMS and public jail bookings; the division has negotiated data-sharing agreements with the prosecuting attorney's office, Bellingham Police Department and CAD 911, and is pursuing a hospital data-sharing agreement to complete the picture.
The platform gives field workers real-time context on high-utilizers: staff can pull up a client record in Gelato and see recent EMS transports, jail bookings and other interactions before arriving on scene. Christensen said those operational interfaces improve in-the-moment service and will support later outcome analysis.
On the evaluation side, Christensen said the county is close to contracting with a Seattle-based evaluation team led by Emily Kafas Saurin (who previously evaluated the alternative response team) for a multi-year study of how the response systems division programs interact with each other and the larger crisis and legal systems.
"Once we get those DSAs in place, then we're able to start building the interfaces," Christensen said. She said the goal is to compare individual outcomes (for example, 12 months before versus 12 months after program engagement) across EMS, hospital, law enforcement and charging data to assess program effectiveness and system-level impacts.
Task force members asked whether citation-level arrests and lower-level contacts will be captured; Christensen said the team expects to expand interfaces and use accumulated data to identify high utilizers earlier and potentially trigger outreach rather than waiting for formal referrals.
The health department framed the data work as a multi-year effort that will require continued funding and staffing to shift from point-in-time evaluations to rolling measurement that can inform program adjustments more rapidly.
