Philadelphia Division of Social Services

Purpose and Approach:

The Fels Institute is currently working closely with the Philadelphia Division of Social Services (DSS) to develop performance measurement and management systems in the City's social services departments. Fels staff and stuedent interns have been working closely with the Philadelphia Departments of Human Services, Recreation, Prisons, Public Health, Behavioral Health, and the Office of Supportive Housing to develop recommendations for the systems.

The project is a partnership between DSS, Fels, and Philadelphia Safe & Sound and is designed to make the best use of the City's investment in cross-agency information system integration to improve outcomes for vulnerable social service clients.

Results and Publications:

During 2007 the Fels Institute has been assisting DSS in three particular areas:

Office of Supportive Housing (OSH)

Fels is working with the City’s emergency shelter and housing services provider to assist in the efforts towards the agency’s ten-year plan to end homelessness. Fels staff and a graduate student intern have assisted OSH in the following ways:

• Facilitating meetings at emergency shelter provider agency sites to discuss performance measures and data collections methods
• Providing training for shelter provider agency staff on the OSH performance management initiative
• Working with OSH information systems to develop processes for performance data collection using the Homelessness Management Information System (HMIS)
• Analyzing and presenting performance management data for all OSH emergency shelter provider agencies

Department of Recreation

Fels is helping the Department of Recreation to understand the performance of the over 150 recreation centers across the city and analyze the demand for programs and services.  Specifically, Fels has been:

• Collecting and analyzing recreation center weekly registration and attendance reports from 2007
• Creating a database for electronic performance monitoring of centers.
• Redesigning performance reports and charts to track key performance metrics
• Developing recommendations for changes to recreation center data reporting requirements
• Creating proposals to transition to an electronic data collection system to enhance department data analysis capacity

Division of Social Services – Performance Management Report 2007

Fels Institute staff have worked with DSS departments to develop a report on all efforts in city social services towards performance improvement.  Entitled “DSS CARES: Performance Management in Philadelphia’s Social Services” it also examines how the DSS-CARES (Cross-Agency Response for Effective Services) information system is contributing to performance improvement efforts.

For more information, contact Allison Brummel, Director of Projects, at brummel@sas.upenn.edu.