Innovation and Reform
DHS Initiatives and Accomplishments
Each year, DHS chooses several Strategic Initiatives: bold, transformative efforts designed to improve the effectiveness of human services for everyone. During 2024, DHS and its partners made significant progress by focusing on a set of Initiatives and in 2024 (see Accomplishments Report). And in 2025, it is working on 12 new Strategic Initiatives (see 2025 Strategic Initiatives Report).
Allegheny County DHS’s Text Message Outreach: Informing, Engaging and Communicating with Residents
DHS sends text messages to county residents to increase awareness of services, provide reminders, and to gather feedback.
Rapid Cycle Evaluation Report: An Early Look at the Community Choice Demonstration
Pittsburgh-Allegheny County is one of eight sites participating in the Community Choice Demonstration (CCD) – a large-scale, multi-site randomized controlled trial to test the efficacy of offering housing mobility-related services […]
Intimate Partner Violence Reform Initiative: Report on progress
The Intimate Partner Violence Reform Initiative was created in May 2022 to coordinate policy and system-level work across agencies in Allegheny County to improve a complex and fragmented system for […]
Improving Access to Mental Health Outpatient Services for Adult Medicaid Patients
Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS), along with Community Care Behavioral Health (CCBH), are pursuing a series of investments and initiatives aimed at addressing access to mental health services.
Allegheny Go Program: Interactive Dashboard
This dashboard reports on application statistics and participant demographics for the Allegheny Go program, a transportation assistance program.
An Agile Response to an Unexpected Challenge: How the Older Adult Protective Services Program Reinvented Itself to Respond to Growing Demand
Read about how Allegheny County responded to an 82% increase in reports of need to Older Adult Protective Services. Click here to read more information about older adult protective services […]
Evaluation Findings on the Use of Predictive Risk Models in Child Welfare
This report reviews the research evidence on algorithms in child welfare, specifically focusing on the causal impacts of the AFST and comparable predictive risk models (PRMs).
Community Need Index
Updated with 2022 data. The Allegheny County Need Index was developed to identify areas of the County that have greater relative need. This report and related materials explore census tracts in need and recent trends.
Allegheny County Discounted Fares Pilot Program
The Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS) partnered with Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) to launch a new transportation assistance program in November 2022 called the Discounted Fares Pilot. This […]
DHS 2023 Accomplishments
This report highlights the 2023 DHS accomplishments that stood out. There are many, many other achievements. We chose the ones that made the biggest difference.
Allegheny County Data Warehouse
Updated information added. View information about the Allegheny County Data Warehouse, which brings together and integrates client and service data from a wide variety of sources both internal and external to the County.
Annual Human Services Case Competition for Local Graduate Students
Updated 2023 information. Reports about DHS’s yearly case competition, which invites local graduate students on interdisciplinary teams to solve a problem in local government.
DHS Annual Plans and Budgets
In its responsibility for administering publicly-funded human services, Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS) plans for the allocation of more than $1B in areas that span behavioral health, children […]
Generating a Fully Synthetic Human Services Dataset
In 2022, staff at the Urban Institute partnered with the Allegheny County DHS and the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (WPRDC) to pilot synthetic data generation at the local level, […]