Johnson County Early Intervention System

DSSG has partnered with Johnson County and Salt Lake County to build a prototype early intervention system (EIS) for individuals who repeatedly cycle through multiple systems, including jails, EMS, mental health services. Currently, there is little coordination between systems to address each person’s underlying needs. An accurate Early Intervention System will quickly identify individuals at risk of contact with any or all systems so our partners can provide appropriate services and interventions to them.

To achieve this goal, we developed models that assign risk scores to individuals making contact with one system of making future contact with another system. These models produce ranked lists of individuals at risk who may receive follow-up care or interventions. The models provide proactive risk warnings at points of contact (e.g., EMS dispatch, jail bookings).

See this blog post for a broad overview of the project. The paper Reducing Incarceration through Prioritized Interventions is under review and provides a more in-depth description of the project’s implementation and its results. More specific documentation of the code itself can be built with Sphinx by make -C doc html or the public documentation may be viewed online at johnson-county-ddj.readthedocs.io.