New York City Health and Human Services (HHS)—Connect

CONNECT is a consortium of five states that have agreed to pool their collective expertise to make interstate information sharing a reality. New York City's Health and Human Service (HHS) agencies serve more than 2 million clients.

Before the HHS-Connect program, case workers were required to log in to several agency systems to view the clients' cases across the diverse benefit programs. HHS-Connect now uses innovative technologies to improve the city's ability to serve its HHS clients, while providing better customer service and online access. HHS-Connect leverages the technology resources in place at the city's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), furthering the implementation of PlanIT—the city's IT strategy. The varied types of data involved in the information exchange and the number of agencies affected by this exchange pose an unprecedented challenge to the IT services of DoITT.

With the establishment of the NIEM exchanges, the worker portal is able to retrieve relevant client information from the connected agencies and collate it for presentation to case workers. The worker portal presents a holistic view of the client information across agencies to the case workers, allowing them to practice collaborative case management and make speedier decisions for benefit delivery.

For example, this project developed NIEM 2.0-conformant Information Exchange Package Documentation to use in the exchange of school meals form data.