DISQ helps agencies that receive funding through the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program strengthen the quality of data they produce to help improve services for people with HIV and public understanding of the HIV epidemic.
Agencies that receive federal funding through the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program (RWHAP) provide essential services to people with HIV, including HIV primary medical care, support services, and medication. Collectively, they serve more than half of people with diagnosed HIV in the United States each year.
It is critical that these agencies submit high-quality data in federally required reports to ensure that clients are receiving optimal care, to illustrate the impact of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, and to accurately represent the status of the HIV epidemic to stakeholders including Congress, the HIV community, and the public.
The initiative
The Data Integration, Systems, & Quality (DISQ) team provides national training and technical assistance to help agencies that receive funding through the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program manage and accurately report their program data. We provide webinars, resources on TargetHIV, peer learning, and individualized technical assistance to help agencies with each step of the data management process.
A long-standing challenge for these agencies is that data frequently come from multiple sources and data systems and it can be challenging to locate, transfer, map, combine, and interpret data. We help agencies streamline data integration between common data sources. We also coordinate directly with data system vendors to help them understand federal reporting requirements, and we provide technical assistance to agency staff on how to navigate common data systems.
Our DISQ project aims to ensure that data are accurate and can be used to understand and improve services for people with HIV. This project benefits agencies that serve people with HIV as well as the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) HIV/AIDS Bureau (HAB) that receives the data and administers Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program funding.
The impact
The DISQ project is a five-year initiative that began in 2020 and evolved from an earlier initiative at CAI, the Data and Reporting Technical Assistance (DART) project, which ran from 2011-2020. That project contributed to significant increases in data completeness, and now our DISQ project focuses on sustainable strategies for improving data quality and streamlining data management.
In the project’s first year, we hosted 18 webinars with a total of 3,600 participants and engaged in 1,000 one-on-one technical assistance interactions with agency staff. The DISQ project helps improve public understanding of the HIV epidemic and helps agencies balance the demands of data reporting with their important work providing services to clients with HIV.
Project funder and key partners
- Funder: Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) HIV/AIDS Bureau (HAB).
- Partners: The project is led by CAI and includes partnerships with Mission Analytics Group, Abt Associates Inc., and Deborah J. Isenberg (consultant).
Leadership and contact
Ruchi Mehta: disq.contact@caiglobal.org