The University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) Social Interventions Research & Evaluation Network (SIREN) has a history of meaningful research on social screening in healthcare settings. Importantly for the work of Apex, the university has produced significant literature on the history and benefits of school-based health centers. When a team of researchers from UCSF reached out to express interest in data from the School-Based Health Center Data Hub to understand more about screening in SBHCs, we immediately saw potential in the partnership. One of the principles of the SBHC Data Hub is to collect data once and use it as many times as possible. UCSF’s request was an opportunity to share data for additional analysis aligned with Apex’s distinctive set of values.
The SBHC Data Hub is a relational database, which allows Apex to connect different types of data at various levels, including patient, visit, and site. For this project, we provided SBHC screening, visit/encounter, and operational data to our partners at UCSF to assist their understanding of screening results, visit outcomes, and other contextual factors.
Data privacy is at the top of our priorities when it comes to collecting information from organizations, especially programs serving youth. We’ve shared limited data sets that empower researchers to conduct their own analyses, particularly when we’ve partnered with entities who hold their own evaluation capacity. We discussed this opportunity with our SBHC partners, granting them the freedom to opt in or out of participation. For SBHCs who chose to participate, data sharing agreements between Apex, UCSF, and the SBHC sponsor organizations allowed access to the data in ways that safeguard all involved while fostering the advancement of crucial research.
Mutually beneficial partnerships between Apex and academic institutions create opportunities for us to refine processes for data sharing, allowing us to document systems to further support this type of project in the future. We recognize synergy with higher education and academic research, knowing that insights shared are insights multiplied.