Data Integration
DC Department of Behavioral Health
Building a single source of truth for behavioral health data.
The challenge
As the District moved Medicaid to a whole-person care model, DBH set out to modernize how it collected and used behavioral health data from nearly 70 community providers. The agency needed timely, centralized, reliable data to support decision-making, meet federal reporting requirements, and advance its vision of whole-person care and population health across the District.
The approach
Starting in 2022, IdeaCrew partnered with DBH to build the Integrated Technology Engine (ITE), a cloud-based data hub in the Azure environment. As we mapped data arriving from dozens of providers in inconsistent formats, the deeper opportunity became clear: give the agency data it could fully trust. We built a Provider Gateway that collects behavioral health supplemental data and validates it against hundreds of criteria the moment it arrives, giving providers immediate feedback. We integrated and reconciled more than 20 million Medicaid claim records, built interactive Tableau dashboards, published a companion guide distributed to more than 70 providers, and developed a machine-learning model that consolidates client records across disparate systems into a single trusted view.
The outcome
DBH gained a centralized, trusted data foundation for federal reporting and data-driven decisions, and the tools to see a single, accurate picture of the clients it serves. The ITE is IdeaCrew’s strongest proof that our work extends well beyond health insurance marketplaces, into data integrity, governance, and analytics for any agency that needs to trust its own information.
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