[Editor note: We’re excited to share this post from Shauna Batcheller, Care Coordination Program Director at the Helpline Center, South Dakota’s 211 and 988 service provider]
Nexus SD is a collaborative statewide initiative to develop capacities for community information exchange among health, human and social service providers across the state of South Dakota. This collaboration’s vision is to streamline connection between multi-sector providers to address social needs and drive positive outcomes among higher risk and underserved populations.
The South Dakota Department of Health launched Nexus SD with funding from the Center for Disease Control as part of a national initiative to address Covid-19 health disparities in higher risk populations. The Nexus SD pilot began in March of 2024 among fourteen partner organizations across two communities, with an additional 15 to 20 partners expected to join over the next few months.
The Helpline Center, South Dakota’s 211 and 988 provider, is one of the key partners of this innovative initiative. We work alongside the SD Department of Health and FindHelp to break down silos and support communities in their efforts to coordinate whole-person care.
Helpline Center’s community resource directory and 211 services are known throughout the state for providing reliable information about the human services available to people in need. We’ve built partnerships with organizations in communities across South Dakota for more than 50 years. These organizations are in touch with us often, sometimes daily, and this shows in the reliability of our data. We have a team of four resource data specialists who manage between 300-500 updates a day.
Nexus SD is designed to leverage Helpline Center’s resource data service as a core asset of the information exchange infrastructure, and Open Referral’s Human Service Data Specification is one of the key tools that we are using to establish this interoperable approach.
Working with our website service provider, Connect211 (previously featured on Open Referral’s blog here), Helpline Center’s resource data is now made available to FindHelp through a web service – a Human Service Data API. With this new API, FindHelp is able to quickly sync data from our system to its database, as updates are made on a daily basis.
Findhelp also provides resource data signals to the Helpline Center for any updates that community organizations make to their records in Findhelp. This helps to reduce the system update fatigue experienced by community organizations, allowing them to update their data in one place and have that update shared across the network.
Connect211 has even developed a new feature for this data service. Within the resource directory records, Helpline Center data specialists specify the first step that a help seeker should take in order to access a service – known as the “application process.” With an extension to HSDS developed by Connect211, this prioritized data point is now also represented in the FindHelp system as “Next Steps” – providing Nexus SD users with the correct action steps to guide their clients and patients to more effectively access services.
With the resource data integration now in place, Nexus SD users are able to search and identify resources to help address the social needs of their clients and patients – and, in some cases, make referrals directly to those partners –utilizing local data provided by the Helpline Center which complements Findhelp’s existing resource data.
While HSDS is a critical component to our technology strategy, the bigger challenge that we have tackled is in the design of our partnership. The Nexus SD partners navigated a lengthy process of dialogue and trust-building over months prior to the launch, which has resulted in a productive, mutually beneficial relationship. Now, we see great opportunity to complement each other’s strengths – and equitably share in the value that our work generates –in order to ensure that our partnership is built for the long haul.
Our 2024 successes and challenges are just the beginning of what we expect to be a fruitful journey. Already this experience has generated positive feedback from our users – including more input of additional resources that should be added to our directory service. We intend to continue building our capacity to exchange resource data with other systems, enabling more organizations and people to benefit from our local knowledge (all without having to change our core technology or build new software ourselves). By working together, we can ensure that South Dakota residents have many opportunities to find their way to resources that help them live healthier and more secure lives.
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