State, local governments honored for NIEM initiatives

A number of state and local governments were honored with the 2014 Best of NIEM award, which highlights the work that organizations do to use the National Information Exchange Model managed out of the federal government’s Homeland Security Department.

At its core, NIEM is a collaborative partnership of agencies and organizations across all levels of government and with private industry that aims to share critical information at in areas such justice, public safety, emergency and disaster management, intelligence, and homeland security enterprise.

NIEM is designed to develop, disseminate and support enterprisewide information exchange standards and processes that will enable jurisdictions to automate information sharing.

According to a press release, the winners from state and local government are:

Shared Computer Operations for the Protection and Enforcement II — from the Nevada Department of Public Safety; Clark County, Nevada; Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department; Henderson, Nevada; Las Vegas and North Las Vegas.

The project, called SCOPE II, is a regional initiative to modernize and replace 35- and 45-year-old public safety legacy information systems.

SCOPE II enables 80 law enforcement and justice agencies at every level of government to share information to provide enhanced public safety and justice services by using a shared repository, including person demographics, descriptors and criminal history, to provide agencies with more complete and accurate information.

The benefits in time savings are estimated to be $8.3 million per year.

North Carolina Families Accessing Services through Technology — from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.

The program introduces new technological tools and business processes that will enable the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services and the 100 county departments of social services to spend less time performing administrative tasks and more time assisting families.

The use of NIEM helped facilitate the design and implementation of services and message exchanges that are common to many HHS services in most states, so they can be reused.

This provided other states with the opportunity to reuse and build upon a rich set of message exchanges and architectural framework and enabling them to provide enhanced, effective and efficient services to families.

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections information sharing —  from the state of Wisconsin, with funding from the National Crime Information Center Information Sharing Act and in partnership with the Justice Department.

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections completed two projects to better identify offenders and share real-time information.

Offenders are identified through the Synchronization Process, which sends fingerprint images taken by DOC agencies to DOJ and DOC at the same time. Now, DOJ receives all alias names, active offenses and rules of supervision — data elements that couldn’t have been shared with the old batch files. This improves efficiency for the law enforcement community and saves money for the DOC Monitoring Center and agents, since law enforcement no longer needs to call them for the information.

Pima County, Arizona, Justice–Health Integration Project — from Pima County, Arizona.

Like many jurisdictions across the country, Pima County, Arizona, faces challenges managing offender care and their successful re-entry into the community as service demands increase and budgets decrease. The Pima County Justice-Health Integration Initiative used NIEM to leverage participating stakeholder information systems, establishing a standard vocabulary so the agencies could share information and translate the content into the language of each system. NIEM’s extensibility enabled them to define medical and behavior health terminology used by stakeholder agencies.

This exchange will promote discharge planning for offenders, improve the efficacy of community care, and subsequently reduce recidivism and associated expense to the community.

This effort went live August 2014 and will significantly reduce the number of labor intensive, manual phone calls between medical staff at the Pima County Adult Detention Center and the Community Partnership of Southern Arizona.