Sonoma County Group Creating Trauma-Informed Network of Care
A Sonoma County, Calif., group formed to address adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) is creating a Trauma-Informed Network of Care (TINoC).
Sonoma Connect | Sonoma Unidos (SC|SU) is a coalition of partners and community members working together to improve Sonoma County’s network of care.
The Resource Connection Network (RCN), is working with community-based organizations, county departments, school and community leaders, and community health centers to identify needs and priorities.
“This project seeks to achieve two distinct but overlapping aims: to support high-quality comprehensive resources, closed-loop referrals to support Sonoma County’s ACEs Trauma Informed Network of Care partners, which includes healthcare providers, education & government leaders, and CBOs; and to create a more integrated ecosystem for referral and information sharing by implementing interoperability functionality across technology systems,” said Beth Paul, community leader and senior program manager at Redwood Community Health Coalition (RCHC), in a statement
RCHC is a network comprised of 19 members, 18 community health centers and a wellness education site, with sites in Marin, Napa, Sonoma, Contra Costa, Solano, and Yolo counties. Formed in 1994, its mission is to improve access to and the quality of care provided for under-served and uninsured people in six counties. RCHC’s major focus is to strengthen the capacity of member health centers to act as a regional network of comprehensive primary care that provides access to consistently high-quality clinical care, effective care coordination and reduce health disparities.
Its member health centers provide patient-centered primary care health homes to 276,639 patients, including 164,498 Medi-Cal patients and over 65,443 uninsured individuals. Fifty-five percent of our patients are Latino and 39 percent of our patients are best served in a language other than English. The vast majority of health center patients are low- and very-low income with 50 percent of patients having incomes below the federal poverty level (FPL) and less than 7 percent of patients with incomes over the 200 percent FPL.
Sonoma Connect recently selected vendor NinePatch to power the Trauma Informed Network of Care. “Many initiatives are ultimately unsuccessful because they choose the technology first and try to fit the community into it after. We are proud of the strength and breadth of our community leadership that chose NinePatch and will ultimately create a stronger, more resilient and more equitable community,” said Cynthia King, RCN Action team co-chair and senior director of programs at RCHC, in a statement.
Last year, the North Coast Health Improvement and Information Network (NCHIIN), a California nonprofit organization providing both health information exchange and health improvement in Humboldt County, announced it was working with NinePatch to allow it to serve as the community information exchange in the region.
NinePatch will provide its social and health integration platform to the Sonoma County community to identify and address gaps in access to resources, to better coordinate services, and to communicate between organizations in the community’s network. Referrals may be initiated by, or received from, any organization type (e.g., health/behavioral care provider, social service provider, school, other referral network, etc.); to facilitate ease of access to social services, health care, mental health care, substance misuse, and non-clinical wellness services.
“CBOs cannot be expected to bear the burden of updating their resource directory information and receiving referrals in different places for multiple networks. These organizations do not have the operational capacity and may choose not to participate in any network. It is also understandable that different organizations (e.g., health systems) may prefer certain or pre-existing referral platforms, so our goal here is to enable these various platforms to coexist in an integrated community-wide ecosystem,” said Adriana Arrizon, SC|SU director, in a statement. “Our decision to choose NinePatch was based on our community’s clear understanding of our goals, and their unique abilities to accommodate and integrate with existing systems. It is very important to meet every organization where they are.”
