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Introducing Profiles: customize our standard for your domain!

Greg Bloom Leave a comment Blog

We designed the Human Service Data Specifications (HSDS)to make it easy to share information about human services of any kind. But given the many nuanced differences across human service sectors – and states and countries and etc – it’s just not feasible to standardize every possible kind of information associated with any kind of service anywhere. So we didn’t try to do that!

Instead, HSDS standardizes the most common information elements that can be expected in virtually any service – which turns out to be a relatively small set of fields, especially when it comes to the core requirements. This ensures that HSDS is relatively practical to adopt; however, at the same time, we do want users to be able to share additional information that is important to their communities even if not specified in the core format. To strike this balance, we’ve encouraged adopters to develop extensions through which they could include information that HSDS does not specify.

Now, with the publication of the new and improved HSDS version 3.0, we’ve gone even farther in enabling users to customize the specification to meet their specific needs, while preserving interoperability across our diverse ecosystem.

HSDS 3.0 supports “Profiles” through which adopters can publish a formalized set of extensions, constraints, and enumerations that together amount to their own tailored version of the standard. Continue reading →

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Report: building community-based service signposting infrastructure in the UK

Tris Lumley Leave a comment Blog

NPC (New Philanthropy Capital) is a UK-based nonprofit whose mission is to help nonprofits and those that fund them to maximise their impact for the people they exist to serve. We work with individual nonprofits and funders to help them develop their strategies, learn and improve as individual organisations, and over our 20 year history we’ve worked with hundreds of organisations. But the impact we can have by working on the infrastructure that supports (or should support!) all nonprofits is greater still than that we have by working with organisations one-to-one.

One of the most ubiquitous challenges we’ve found throughout NPC’s history is signposting and referrals. In all our work to highlight effective nonprofits, we’ve found that a lack of infrastructure and standards around referrals mean that organisations can’t maximise their impact. Great nonprofits don’t necessarily get the referrals they should. People who want and need support don’t necessarily find the organisations and programmes that would work for them. In a sector that has very scarce resources, failing to crack the referrals challenge leaves huge potential on the table.

So NPC has been excited to work on the challenge of signposting and referrals over the last 7 years. First, we worked collaboratively with a group of youth nonprofits to develop a service directory prototype platform for young people called My Best Life. We built the service from the ground up – populating the directory with service data manually and laboriously, as there simply weren’t feeds available of information about local services in the area of London we focused on in the prototype. And because we wanted to work towards a standardised infrastructure for the future, we provided an Open Referral compliant feed of our data.

Today, NPC’s work has moved on from prototyping a product (now being taken to market by tech for good company Mind Of My Own) to exploring the infrastructure needed to support directories like My Best Life, and youth nonprofits as a whole. Working with the public benefit programme of UK domain name registrar Nominet – an organisation that knows the importance of digital infrastructure – NPC has led a collaborative programme of work called Signpost+. The first phase of the programme focused on research and discovery – identifying organisations who were contributing to the (fledgling) signposting and referrals infrastructure for young people, and working with them to envisage the future infrastructure of the youth sector.

This work culminated in the publication of a report called How might we improve signposting for young people? which set out our recommendations for the future. Continue reading →

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Laying the foundation for a community information exchange in Utah

Caitlin Schneider Leave a comment Blog

In 2021, Utah’s incoming governor Spencer Cox outlined a plan – the One Utah Roadmap – to address key priorities for the state in his first 500 days, ranging from coordinated COVID response to addressing the social determinants of health. In support of these priorities, the Governor’s office formed a working group focused on the prospect of “improving social determinants of health (SDOH) service delivery.” United Way of Salt Lake was invited to co-chair this committee in collaboration with Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services. In this blog post, I will share a summary of our experience and consider the path ahead. 

The One Utah Roadmap’s SDOH working group was comprised of subject matter experts, public health officials, community-based organizations, and client advocates interested in more effectively coordinating care, sharing information, and meeting people’s needs. 

We invited Greg Bloom, on behalf of Open Referral, to address the committee during our initial meeting. During that first conversation, we observed that there are a variety of efforts to facilitate the sharing of information already underway in our communities. Continue reading →

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Introducing Version 3.0 of the Human Service Data Specifications

Daniel Smith 3 Comments Blog

UPDATE: As of May 1st 2023, this upgrade is considered official! Thanks to our workgroup and all those in the community who contributed input. Read below for details.

[This post is from Dan Smith, Open Data Services Cooperative‘s Partnerships Lead for Health, Social and Physical Activity Data. Welcome, Dan!]

We are excited to share a proposal for version 3.0 of the Human Service Data Specifications – available now for a final period of review and comment by our community. 

We have been working toward this proposal for much of the past year, in a community-led process of gathering input about emerging and outstanding needs across our expanding network of human service informatics. … We are excited to share the fruits of this process with the broader community.

Request for Comment period for HSDS 3.0

This post marks the beginning of a final two-week Request for Comment period. During this time, our community can review and submit any final issues that may need to be addressed before HSDS 3.0 is formally approved by the working group.

We expect version 3.0 to be the last significant HSDS upgrade for a while, so if you have any questions or concerns about its suitability for your current or future potential use of HSDS, please raise them now.

How to provide feedback on HSDS 3.0

We encourage you to share feedback on the proposed version 3.0 in the following ways: Continue reading →

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Just Released: Toolkit for information exchange initiatives from the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT at HHS

Greg Bloom Leave a comment Blog
Diagram of the SDOH Information Exchange Foundational Elements: Community Readiness and Stewardship, Mission and Purpose, Values and Principles are all the baseline foundation. Then Policy, Legal, Measurement and Evaluation and Financing is built on top. Finally, Implementation services, Technical Infrastructure, and User Support and Learning Network are key elements. All tied together by Governance.

I’m excited to share with you this toolkit for information exchange initiatives that aim to address the social determinants of health – shared by the Office of the National Coordination for Health Information Technology at the US Department of Health and Human Services (known as ONC). The toolkit (PDF downloadable here) synthesizes subject matter expertise from across the health, human, and social service sectors to offer guidance on the design and implementation of initiatives to enable information exchange among healthcare and social care providers.

This toolkit largely addresses issues beyond resource directory information, and yet it reflects many of the lessons learned and strategic objectives of the Open Referral initiative. It may be helpful for communities that are working to improve their supply chain for resource directory information – as well as communities for which resource directory information is just one piece of a more complex strategic goal. I’ll offer some background context below:  Continue reading →

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Our 2022 Year in Review

Greg Bloom Leave a comment Blog

Our 2022 Year in Review report is now available to review!

This annual practice of review and reflection is an opportunity for us to step back and assess our progress across multiple objectives as we work towards our shared goal: a future in which it’s easy to share, find, and use information about the resources available to people in need.

This year is especially notable for the range of ways in which we’ve helped governments, nonprofits, and private sector actors take action to modernize their resource directory information supply chains – on a local, statewide, and even national level.

The report shares stories of pilot projects across the U.S. in which Open Referral’s standards, tools, and strategies are enabling cooperation among organizations that previously struggled to work together in pursuit of their common goals.
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Introducing the Whatcom County Resource Information Collaborative

Kristi Slette Leave a comment Blog

This post is brought to us by Kristi Slette, Secretariat of the Whatcom Resource Information Collaborative in Washington state. Welcome, Kristi!

Washington state’s Whatcom County – the north western most county in continental U.S. – is a resourceful community with many collaborative community-based organizations that serve residents in need.

For many years, the leadership and staff from many of these organizations have voiced a desire to improve the accessibility and reliability of information about resources available in our community. In the past, this desire sparked several attempts to develop a centralized resource directory – but in each instance, our vision was hampered by the complexities of this challenge. We all shared the same goal, but different organizations had different needs and interests; when it came time to address all of them in one single website, we struggled to move forward together.

Learning from the past

In 2019, a series of community assessments and strategic planning sessions once again surfaced the need for a resource directory as a priority for Whatcom County, and a coalition of human and social service organizations convened to address this challenge with fresh eyes. This time, we sought to learn from previous efforts.

Through extensive dialogues with three different groups – social service providers who had been involved in the previous resource access initiatives, the conveners of those initiatives, and managers of current resource directories in our area – we perceived a set of key themes: the importance of leadership, human capacity, and buy-in from the community.

Through this reflection, we recognized that technology – which had previously been our primary focus – is actually only part of the solution. Rather than just designing a new tool, our new initiative would need to focus on building the capacities and relationships that will be needed to ensure that any such system is adaptive, sustainable, and trustworthy.

Building capacity for collaboration

In 2021, having made it a priority to improve access to resources for families with young children, the Whatcom County Health Department provided some seed funding to support our new initiative to establish a resource directory information system for the county. This time, we resolved to build a system that would be collectively “owned” by our community as a whole. Continue reading →

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Michigan 211’s new resource data infrastructure: providing social service information as a service

Shelby Lummis Leave a comment Blog

Since the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, Michigan 211 has received an increasing number of requests for real-time access to our social service directory database from partners and collaborators across the state. We actively maintain over 40,000 service records offered throughout Michigan, verifying its accuracy on an ongoing basis – and carefully curating this information to connect community members to local services. When initiatives like one of Michigan’s new behavioral health services wanted to leverage our information to improve their ability to meet the needs of their callers, we wanted to ensure that this critical information can be available where and when they need it.

To address this emergent need, 211 made the strategic decision to develop a cloud-based service that securely provides direct access to our resource database for third-party partners – our “social service directory data service.” Toward this end, we partnered with Brightstreet Group as our technology consultants, and adopted Open Referral’s Human Service Data Specification as the technical blueprint for resource data service. 

By building this service on the foundation laid by Open Referral – from data exchange standards to an array of tools and strategic insights for new forms of resource data partnerships – we were able to focus our resources on meeting the unique needs of our partners and community at large. 

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Upgrading the Human Service Data Specifications: 2022 development cycle underway

Greg Bloom 1 Comment Blog

As Open Referral’s network grows – involving more stakeholders in the development of interoperable resource directory information supply chains – our tools and practices must evolve in kind to support more complex needs.

So we are excited to share that Open Referral has initiated a new development cycle to upgrade the Human Service Data Specifications. This cycle has kicked off with a specific objective to address a significant issue: our specifications need to be adapted across diverse contexts, to support different conventions in different places, while preserving a core of interoperability across our ecosystem.
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To support this workgroup’s efforts, we are seeking feedback from a broad array of stakeholders across our network. For instance, this Friday (July 22nd) from 11a-1p, we will host an open “fishbowl” discussion in which workgroup members will review proposals line-by-line, at which any members of our community are welcome to observe and discuss by chat – invitations available by request. We encourage interested parties to comment on the documents above, or discuss in our issues queue on Github, or reach out directly via [email protected]
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