Four Pennsylvania health information exchanges are collaborating on a statewide platform for connecting patients to social services, with the goals of making social determinants of health (SDOH) data as shareable as clinical data and enabling a population-level view of citizens' needs and community-based organizations’ capacity to meet them.
The HIEs (ClinicalConnect, Central PA Connect, HSX and KeyHIE) were awarded $15.5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to collectively procure a single, statewide, resource and referral tool with the functionality to do closed-loop referrals for health-related social needs. The HIOs will integrate the tool into the PA Patient and Provider Network (P3N) and health information exchange.
According to details of an Aug. 4 Pennsylvania eHealth Partnership Advisory Board Meeting, the vendor FindHelp has been chosen to build out the statewide platform called PA Navigate that will facilitate closed-loop referrals for health-related social needs (HRSN).
On its website, HSX, the HIE for the Philadelphia region, described how, along with the other Pennsylvania HIEs, it will join the collaborative effort between state agencies, counties, and local nonprofits and community organizations, healthcare, and social services providers to create an integrated platform for care coordination. This platform will serve as a system to screen residents for needs that impact their ability to thrive, such as childcare, transportation, nutritional support, housing insecurity and many other needs related to social determinants of health.
Categories of available services will include:
- Medical Access/Affordability
- Transportation
- Food Insecurity
- Housing Insecurity
- Homelessness
- Financial Strain
- Clothing
- Utilities
- Employment
- Childcare
Once needs are identified, residents may be referred to community-based organizations (CBOs) that can provide needed services, and CBOs will be able to “close the loop” with the person making referrals so they know the resident received services. CBOs will have access to the site for free and will be able to use the platform to demonstrate their community impact to their funders. This platform will also be available to the general public so that residents can identify available services for themselves or their families.
In a June discussion with Healthcare Innovation’s Mark Hagland, Marty Lupinetti, the CEO of HSX, said this effort puts the HIE in the middle of a closed-loop referral service for all social services. “We’ll be the ones to understand what the provider is requesting, confirming that the patient received that service, and “closing the loop” by providing that information back to the provider and care team,” he said. “So we’re taking the lead role in now implementing this new service. As a result, it is going to push HSX very quickly into ingesting SDOH health needs assessments, taking that data in and sharing that as needed to better inform patient care needs. So HSX will now combine SDOH and physical-health data to improve overall care for a patient. And many new and valuable things can be done with that combination of data sets.”
The new platform is expected to be in production in 2023.
