This is the second in a series of eight articles about the Travis County Forensic Mental Health Project.
The Travis County Forensic Mental Health Project delivered its recommendations to the Travis County Commissioners in March 2023. The goal of these recommendations is to provide solutions other than jail to address mental health and substance abuse disorders in the county.
Recommendation #1
The report’s first recommendation is to digitize Travis County’s legal infrastructure and add to the existing local health information exchange (HIE) to provide data sharing at all levels.
This recommendation addresses the issues—or “gaps”—of outdated data collection methods and non-standardized datasets.
Many county entities rely on pencil-and-paper data-collection methods, “making data manually intensive to collect and difficult to retrieve and merge with other relevant datasets.”
In addition to outdated collection methods, many of these entities also “collect different and differently defined data.”