Response of Suffolk County needs an advanced solution to help counsellors better assess risk with respect to callers.

This challenge affects the counsellors and users of the counseling service (callers). Although our solution is specific to Response of Suffolk County, other similar organizations that benefit people in crisis may also have this problem and be benefitted by our work.

Counsellors may not be fully aware of other factors or signs that may indicate high risk in callers. This in turn may hinder actions that could be taken to better assist callers.

A software tool that leverages call transcript data and chat data (between callers and counsellors) to develop a data driven analysis of potential risk would be a successful solution to this problem.

The target users for this software solution are the counsellors at Response of Suffolk County.

The counsellors give guidance to callers who are often under high stress. They must be able to analyze the level of risk of the caller, and respond in an appropriate way for that situation.

Our software solution would be algorithm based.

It will essentially process and analyze the data to produce a more structured construct of ‘risk’. It will take existing research in the field of suicide risk analysis into consideration in looking at this problem. This would mean researching both the psychology underlying this issue, and the current technical solutions in place. Although there are several products that have analyzed similar data from crisis hotlines, none of them worked specifically with the data provided by Response of Suffolk County, which could provide a new lense for this issue. Although our solution will largely be data-driven, this is ultimately a human problem where we would need to strike a balance between analysis and giving credibility to people in the field.