Amid the disruptions and crises of 2020, the Open Referral Initiative rallied to meet increasing and rapidly changing needs for improved flow of information about community resources.
As our new year starts to take shape – with collective needs for collaboration still rising unabated – we’ve taken some time to reflect on our progress and accomplishments.
Check out our 2020 Year in Review, embedded below – or viewable and downloadable directly from this link. Continue reading
[This post is from Laura Marx, President and CEO of United Way of North Carolina. Welcome, Laura!]
In 2019, the first statewide health and human service care coordination platform launched in North Carolina: NCCARE360.
Part of a broader healthy opportunities network envisioned by the state Department of Health and Human Services (NC DHHS) — NCCARE360 provided our state an opportunity to build a collaborative model of care coordination between health care providers and community based organizations (CBOs) focused on ensuring patients connect with services addressing social determinants of health (SDoH).
NCCARE360 is supported by the Foundation for Health Leadership and Innovation in partnership with NC DHHS. The United Way of North Carolina/NC211 is building this care coordination infrastructure in partnership with Expound Decision Systems and UniteUs.
[Welcome to Jonathan Abbett, VP of User Experience at Activate Care!]
Imagine if our healthcare and social service systems were able to seamlessly coordinate care around all of our physical, behavioral, and social health needs. Back in 2012, inspired by this vision, I joined a technology start-up that is now known as Activate Care.
I am joined now by a much larger team of colleagues supporting our pursuit of that vision, and we’re honored to work with a community of hundreds of healthcare and social services organizations using our platform. Every so often, we stop to look around our industry and ponder what else we could be doing to help people in need, and to better serve the helpers – the people who work in healthcare, social services, and I&R agencies – who are the end-users of our tools.
What is clear is that communities across America are all at different stages in their efforts to address the social determinants of health (SDoH). These non-medical factors like housing stability, food security, and community safety all play an outsized role in the physical and behavioral health of all of us.
For this reason, many communities have launched or are in the process of developing a portfolio of interventions that help to address SDoH. Think of a coordinated entry system for housing services, the placement of food pantries in hospitals, or a high-risk young-mothers program designed to prevent involvement with the justice system. These efforts have the potential to change lives.
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The most successful social interventions go further than this screen-and-refer approach, and embrace the approach that Activate Care calls screen-and-intervene. In order to help communities leverage the power of coordinated care interventions, our care coordination and referral management systems need to talk to each other. Open Referral helps us solve a critical piece of this puzzle. Continue reading
The U.S. Administration for Community Living provides funding and support to networks of community-based organizations who serve elders and people with disabilities. ACL’s grantees include a vast array of services that help people cope with food insecurity and transportation issues, manage chronic disease, support employment and economic independence, reduce social isolation, and address other factors outside of the medical clinic that impact people’s health.
ACL recognizes that this work is fundamentally collaborative. Vulnerable people require holistic support, which typically involves coordination among institutions; however, such institutions often struggle to work together, in part because their technologies can’t ‘speak’ to each other.
To address this need for interoperability among health, human, and social service providers, ACL has announced the Social Care Referrals Challenge: an opportunity to identify, test, and promote new methods for sharing data in the coordination of care across organizations and technologies, such as sharing information about resources and/or enabling ‘warm referrals’ across systems. The ACL invites participation in this challenge from state and community leaders in the aging and disability network, as well as health care systems, health plans, and health IT vendors.
Last week, ACL updated the Challenge specifications with a range of new details – including a criteria that any proposals involving resource directory data should use Open Referral’s resource data exchange standards (the Human Service Data Specification and API protocols).
Here in Benetech’s home of the San Francisco Bay Area, our communities are facing compounding crises: the pandemic, economic crisis, and most recently out of control wildfires forcing thousands of evacuations and causing a new airborne health crisis. This chaos has not only created a more pressing need than ever for human services that can help people stay healthy and secure, but it has also caused major turmoil among service providers.
The result has been an intensification of challenges that were already hard enough – such as just keeping track of what services are available, and when. This information is now changing even more rapidly given the challenges of providing services while social distancing – and given constrictions in funding of various kinds. Community resource referral providers report that their legacy systems aren’t able to keep up with these rapid changes – and many resorted to using Google Docs to keep track of information about services.
These challenges make collaboration more important than ever. That’s why I’m excited to announce the next iteration of Benetech Service Net. Continue reading
We’re excited to share a proposed upgrade to the Human Services Data Specification, authored by our technical partners, the Open Data Services Cooperative.
Over the next two weeks, we’ll field feedback on these proposed changes. Take a look at the proposal in our Github repository – you can leave comments in the Issues queue – or on our documentation site, where you can also comment by first creating an account on hypothes.is (a website annotation service) and then sharing your feedback directly on the web pages.
Before the end of this month, we’ll conduct a video conference to review key points and discuss any outstanding issues (indicate your interest and availability here). Assuming we reach rough consensus, our target is to approve version 2.0 in the beginning October.
Below, we provide more context on the primary changes under consideration. Continue reading
With the world in crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic, health, human, and social service providers face a harrowing dilemma: need is skyrocketing, even as providers’ ability to actually help is severely compromised. Many institutions have struggled to respond or even closed down entirely – while many new efforts to meet communities’ needs have emerged with astonishing speed.
We’ve seen a wave of new efforts to connect people with information about resources — and, in many cases, these new projects quickly ran into some of the same challenges that the information-and-referral sector has been grappling with for years. Information about the availability of community resources is often harder to find – and harder to trust – than one might expect.
Some of the best instances of rapid action have emerged in places where different kinds of organizations can work together to respond in new ways. This is where Open Referral comes in handy. By facilitating cooperation among organizations that maintain and use information about the resources available to people in need, we make it easier for community leaders to respond to rapidly changing circumstances in ways that make the most out of limited time and resources.
Below, we’ve collected a range of examples of new initiatives from across our network. The breadth of experiences is impressive: in some cases, new initiatives are presenting simplified versions of complex resource data to present for a specific context. In other cases, simplified sets of resource data are being shared with more complex systems, which augment them with local knowledge from end users. And in all cases, we can see a balance between the need to respond to this particular extraordinary moment, with a long-term vision of transformed systems. Continue reading
I’m happy to announce that Sarapis is releasing a Laravel-based Open Referral Directory Solution (ORServices) as open source code!
This software enables anyone to create their own community resource directory information system — with a level of design and functionality that is comparable to proprietary resource directory software systems that are available on the market.
ORServices offers a mobile-friendly, geo-aware directory software with search and granular filters built with Open Referral’s Human Service Data Standard (HSDS) compliant data model. By leveraging HSDS, this system can also establish interoperability with other standardized systems, so that resource directory data can be shared among them.
In 2018, with a small grant provided by the Alliance of Information and Referral Systems to the Sahana Software Foundation, Sarapis developed an Airtable template of a community resource database using Open Referral’s Human Services Data Specification (HSDS). This project responded to a need articulated by many in our community for a lightweight, easy-to-use resource database for the management of complex service directory data.
With the functionality of a basic database, and the user interface of a common spreadsheet, we hypothesized that an Airtable template could provide a workable solution for organizations and projects with very limited funding.
[Welcome to Everett Pompeii of Clerical.AI! We are excited to feature this as our most recent highlighted project from the field of legal services.]
Where should you refer someone for legal help?
The answer given is usually one of two extremes: free legal aid or the local bar association.
There are other options out there, from do-it-yourself apps like Legalzoom to flat rate and limited scope attorneys. However, in the vast ocean of the internet, these resources can be difficult if not impossible to find, and even if you do find them it can be difficult to compare prices. A newly launched platform, Instant Attorney, is aiming to make the problem of finding affordable legal services a whole lot easier. Instant Attorney, which went into open beta last month, is a collaborative legal resource knowledge base built on the Human Services Data Specification (HSDS). Continue reading