People involved in the criminal justice system have significantly higher rates of behavioral and physical health problems than the general population. The rate of serious mental illness among incarcerated persons is estimated to be more than three times higher than in the general population.
A historical lack of coordination between justice and health agencies exacerbates the challenges of providing healthcare to persons and others involved in the justice system since they experience limited access to healthcare not only inside facilities but also in their communities after their release.
To help close the communication gap and increase information sharing between justice and health authorities, the Vera Institute of Justice’s Substance Use and Mental Health Program has launched the “Justice and Health Connect” (JH Connect) website at www.jhconnect.org.
The website includes a toolkit for designing information sharing initiatives, an extensive resource library, policy briefs, legal memos, templates, and webinars designed for diverse audiences and jurisdictions. This resource offers guidance on the type of data exchanges that are legally permissible, outline their potential ethical pitfalls, and highlight promising practices that maximize benefits to clients while reducing costs.
This initiative is being supported by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice (BJA) to promote information sharing solutions for state, local, and tribal authorities. JH Connect provides the ways and solutions on how to share data between community health and justice systems in a confidential, legal, and ethical way.
Paul Wormeli, Executive Director Emeritus of the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute expressed his thoughts to David Cloud, Program Associate with Justice and Health Connect at the Vera Institute of Justice.
According to Wormeli, recent developments in IT to allow the sharing of information has helped promote justice and health collaboration as a practical solution to the overrepresentation of substance use and mental health disorders in the justice system.
He explained that one of the most significant challenges concerns the basic vocabulary and standards used by different agencies and their data systems. The problem is that the health field has a whole proliferation of standards that will only increase with the further development of EHRs.
On the other hand, the justice field has been slower to develop standards so standards that can operate between the systems are needed. Existing standards in the health and justice field are designed for internal use only and don’t focus on the idea of cross domain information sharing.
He also thinks since many smaller jurisdictions are unable to build the kind of technology that is needed to support their own work let alone enable information sharing. Cloud computing is currently the only real option for these jurisdictions to exchange information and he thinks that over the next couple of years there will be an explosion of people using this option.
Wormeli wants to see the concept of identity and privilege management created so that computer systems can establish trust between the systems. This would enable participating agencies to assure each other that the users who will see the data are authenticated and that the distribution of data to such users is restricted and defined for each user.
According to Wormeli, the Global Information Sharing Advisory Committee to the Attorney General has actually created and piloted a specification where this technology can be used to create the environment that will permit interagency information sharing on a whole new level.
For the discussion between Wormeli and David Cloud, go to www.jhconnect.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/paul-wormeli.DC_.pdf