Generating a Fully Synthetic Human Services Dataset

Administrative data, or data collected about the operations of an organization, can help stakeholders understand the complexities of organizational performance. The Department of Human Services (DHS) in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, serves one in five residents of the county every year through child welfare services, behavioral health services, aging services, developmental support services, homeless and housing supports, and family strengthening and youth supports. In the process, DHS collects administrative data about service usage for the purpose of care coordination, case management, and quality improvement efforts.Because of the sensitive nature of this data, DHS has not widely shared the data at an individual level. To allow researchers, service providers, and members of the public to better understand the populations served by DHS, we partnered with the Allegheny County DHS and Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (WPRDC) to create a fully synthetic version of the 2021 Integrated Services dataset. The final synthetic dataset entirely replaced the underlying records that track usage of these services with statistically representative pseudo-records.