Propelled by pandemic, at least 43 states are using online referrals to connect health and social needs
Volunteers carries food to waiting cars at the Utah Food Bank's mobile food pantry on March 11, 2021, in West Valley City, Utah. | Rick Bowmer/AP PhotoBefore the pandemic, the health care world had come to realize that “social determinants” — things like homelessness, food insecurity and a lack of transportation — contributed far more to poor health outcomes and high health care costs than past generations had realized.
Accountability. Transparency. Efficiency. Those are not the words typically associated with America’s frayed social safety net. But what worked in North Carolina is now spreading across the country, and leaders in many states are learning how to change the paradigm. It’s added speed, accountability and practical data about where the unmet needs are for patients and communities.
Covid created “unprecedented stress on human and social services,” said Unite Us co-founder and president Taylor Justice. “I trained as a family doc,” Oliver said. Physicians are getting better at recognizing how unmet socioeconomic needs harm their patients’ health, but don’t always know how to get them help with things like housing. Even if they do try, “it was like referring them to a black hole,” he said.about doing something,” Oliver said.
And critics question whether a venture capital-backed for-profit technology firm — even one that boasts of having Hollywood star and “impact investor” Matthew McConaughey involved — will soak up money that could have been spent on these social needs themselves. Jacob Reider, formerly the number two official in the federal health technology office in the Obama administration, spent the last few years in upstate New York at an organization called Alliance for Better Health, part of a state
There was some trial and error. “We started slow and it grew and grew. Now there are hundreds of organizations,” Reider said. And it’s moved from those six counties in and around Albany to an 18-county network, encompassing the Syracuse region and part of the Adirondacks. In Nebraska, CyncHealth — which includes the Nebraska Health Information Initiative, an entity that enables sharing patient data from one health setting to another — has led Unite Nebraska, which is part of a larger regional network of seven mostly conservative states in the Upper Midwest.
Oregon was ahead of the curve on recognizing the role of social determinants in health. But awareness, even proactively screening patients for unmet social needs, isn’t the same thing as acting on them. The health plans that started Connect Oregon aim to change that.
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