Data Management Systems for Entire Organizations

Joanne Felci

I work at a community health center that is very siloed. Fundraising has their database but then we have a research part of the organization that has their own database, and a HIPAA database for patient information.

We are trying to figure out best practices to share information but still keep what needs to be protected/private secure.

Any suggestions? Thoughts? What have others done if you have to deal with multiple systems/info?

Alex Wong

@Joanne Felci
when there is multiple systems, it is important that there is a common identifier between the systems.

then the rest is to gauge what information can be shared and keeping updated across systems and policy of what info on which system has latet. Data warehouse will help, but will need to pay special attention to HIPPA compliance

Dariel Dixon

I think that it's important to connect only information that is necessary @Joanne Felci. When I worked for a hospital, we never put any information from the medical system in our fundraising database. We always kept them separate for HIPAA compliance. We weren't worried from our perspective, but because we had vendors that we that had security measures outside of our control.

@Alex Wong is absolutely right about keeping track of primary IDs. We're in the process of doing that now with our enterprise data warehouse. Also knowing which IDs to use and when.

Faith Murray

@Joanne Felci
As an org that manages various missions like a seminary college, retreat center, print house, and two collaborating nonprofits, I can empathize. Each of our own ministries has its own database system. Combining the systems has never seemed optimal. However, there is a real need for collaboration and data transfer.

If you are ambitious in your career, my personal advice would be to advocate for one person who is comfortable in database systems (you) to have user access to each of the various systems. The reality I've witnessed is that it's just easier for me to go in to the other databases and extract the information I need on my own schedule than to haggle and try to walk through other users who aren't perhaps as well versed in system integration and imports.

Another option which we have done in the past is determine what fields we need, and then ask IT to go into the other databases and set up an automatic weekly export to a shared folder that your department can access.

As @Alex Wong has said, keep track of the constituent IDs. If possible, try to universalize the IDs and addresses across platforms, but if that is not possible, you can add an attribute to your donor records tracking their IDs in the sister systems, for easier record matching.

Joanne Felci

Thank you all for your thoughts about!

I was thinking something similar to what @Dariel Dixon mentioned - about having a centralized database with connections into the specific systems. IT or Data Management handling the main database but a connection from its demographic information into Raiser's Edge. This is something we are just starting to put a plan together for - so it is years away from coming together (if it ever does).

Christine Robertson

@Joanne Felci If you haven't already, you may want to look at the options with some of the third party import tools (Importacular, IOM, SmartTHING, etc.) to see if that would help. They give you more matching functionality than the Constituent ID/Import ID/SSN and allow you to also compare data to other biographical fields (name, address, email, etc.). That doesn't help with the determination of HIPPA compliance, but it may help once you have the data that you need to update into RE.