Strategies for Financing the Integration of Home Visiting and Early Childhood Data Systems

Over the last decade, state efforts to build stronger data infrastructure and integrate data about early childhood services have continued to grow. A stronger data infrastructure supports states in more easily linking data across programs, which in turn makes it easier to analyze and use that data to answer important policy questions. An Early Childhood Integrated Data System (ECIDS) is a type of data infrastructure being developed in some states. An ECIDS integrates early childhood data, such as data at the child, family, program, and workforce level, collected from a variety of early learning services across different state agencies. However, home visiting data are often excluded from a state’s ECIDS. This can happen for reasons ranging from a lack of accessible data on all home visiting models in a state, to the fact that home visiting services exist across a variety of models with different funding streams and reporting requirements, to the siloed nature of home visiting data, which is often stored in separate, proprietary data systems.