In a field marked by outdated and time-consuming systems, the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice’s information exchange platform gives county jails a new way to share data.

“Every county jail is operated locally, so they have their own management processes and have their own database management systems and structures,” said Alexis Harper, a project manager with Colorado’s Division of Criminal Justice. “These products and technologies do not communicate with each other. They’re meant to be secure and internal to any individual agency — and that prevents the sharing of real-time information.”

Harper serves as the lead for the state’s project that aims to change the way county jails, including Broomfield’s, share critical information about detainees — information that can be critical to the safety of detainees and jail staff, Harper said.

“(Without sharing data) it becomes impossible to maintain a continuity of care for people coming into custody,” Harper said, adding: “It’s important not just for people who have a type of medical problem or an individual safety concern but for everyone in the jail’s custody and its staff.”

The new technology, the Colorado Trusted Interoperability Platform, allows the jails’ individual, independent data systems to share information. This allows details about an individual including critical health records, violent histories and outstanding warrants to be transferred between facilities. The project is funded by federal grants and legislative authority, and without it, jails are relying on outdated and slow information-sharing systems like faxes, according to the state Division of Criminal Justice.

“It helps promote long-term continuity of care and treatment planning as they transition between facilities or into the community,” Harper said.

“If they unfortunately come back to jail … treatment can be picked back up, and stability can be reestablished in an effort to try and get them back to their normalcy and community as quickly as possible.”

Broomfield’s is among the jails participating in the early days of the project, along with a number of other counties, ranging from Costilla to Routt.

CTIP can also be used for jails to generate the state-mandated quarterly reports of their detainees, transitioning a job that Harper said used to take 20 hours down to just a few minutes. It can also be used to help jails and the court system communicate so that people who recently completed their sentence aren’t approached by police who are relying on outdated information.

“It helps to keep a person from being addressed by police … or rearrested for something that is no longer active,” Harper said. “(With the system), the courts are able to process things more effectively, efficiently and quickly, rather than having to close an arrest that never should have happened.”

Harper said she and her team plan to continue expanding the platform, adding new functionalities and jails to the system.

“We’re really excited about the growth of this project,” she said, adding: “We want jails across the state to know if they didn’t jump on the bandwagon initially, it’s no problem — we have lots of opportunity for expansion and for new jails to join.”