Can Community Resource Referral Technologies Support Local COVID-19 Response?


Can Community Resource Referral Technologies Support Local COVID-19 Response?

Editor’s Note:

The April 2020 issue of Health Affairs journal includes the article, “Implementing Community Resource Referral Technology: Facilitators And Barriers Described By Early Adopters,” by Yuri Cartier and colleagues.  In response to the latest world events, we asked the authors to put their work in the context of the current coronavirus crisis. 

In our recent Health Affairs special issue article, we described experiences of 35 health care organizations implementing new community resource referral platforms, technologies designed to streamline the process of connecting individuals with social needs to resources addressing those needs. We found that, while early adopters were by and large satisfied with the platform they had chosen, they faced significant non-technological implementation challenges related to engaging community partners, managing change internally, and sharing data with non-health care partners.

Enter COVID-19, a pandemic with both immediate and long-term effects likely to dramatically change both the medical and social services landscapes. From multiple members of the Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network, we are hearing that health care systems are overcoming longstanding barriers to social care integration with remarkable speed in order provide patients with information about available social resources. Simultaneously, in the social services sector, demand for services has skyrocketed, supply chain strains are leading to difficulty obtaining goods (e.g., for food banks), and many community-based organizations (CBOs) are reporting they’ve lost revenue and had to curtail services.

It seems like just the right time to ask how health care systems that had already integrated community resource referral platforms—specifically designed to improve coordination at the intersection of health care and social services—fared.

To begin exploring this question, we turned back to ask the platform vendors we included in our original article how they had adapted their systems in light of COVID-19 and to ask our health care early adopter interviewees how the platform had helped them respond to the crisis. Here is what we learned from seven vendors and six informants.

COVID-19-Specific Screening And Resources

The most common feature that several platform vendors (Aunt Bertha, One Degree, NowPow, and Healthify) reported adding was tagging COVID-19-related resources, such as pick-up sites for food distribution or senior supermarket shopping hours, so that they could be rapidly collated into lists or special directories. For example, Aunt Bertha launched FindHelp, a version of their national resource directory that focuses on COVID-19 response programs. One Degree created a microsite with resource guides for two regions of California. Likewise, we heard from multiple early adopters that they are developing local resource pages, some within the platform and some on an external page linked from the platform (such as in Camden, NJ).

Vendors and early adopters alike reported devoting significant human resources to verifying organizational data for programs offering emergency resources during the pandemic, with some calling organizations daily in order to keep up with changing hours, locations, capacity, and services.

Vendors are also adding assessments for COVID-19 symptoms and/or potential exposure to COVID-19. For example, Signify Community added an employee screening tool for COVID-19 risk factors, connected to employee workflows, and is using its telephonic social care coordinators to assist employees with risk factors to access social and health resources. Unite Us similarly built an exposure assessment form for patients/clients that directs them to local resources depending on the result. Pieces Iris added universal data fields for patient vital signs (e.g. body temperature, respiratory rate, pulse) for community health workers carrying out health screening.

New Data Analytic Functions

Vendors are building new data analytics to meet the demand for COVID-19 specific data. Healthify and Aunt Bertha both shared that they are expanding their analytics specific to COVID-19, for example to display changes in needs and organizational capacity before and after the beginning of the pandemic and to support funding distribution decisions. Vendors are sharing these data insights with customers and intending to make them available to funders and policymakers as well. Customers also are sharing reports with local stakeholders. One early adopter mentioned that they have started providing data about searches and referrals to their county.

Increasing Platform Accessibility

Vendors have taken a number of measures to increase product accessibility, especially for CBOs. For example, Pieces Iris started offering free licenses to small CBOs. NowPow, which already offered a free version of its product to CBOs, has added the ability to text/email referrals to individuals. Healthify is building an application to match volunteers’ offers with CBOs needing volunteers. And Unite Us has launched a low-touch “rapid response network” version of their platform.

Strengthening Collaboration Between Partner Agencies

There are early indications that the platforms are being used to streamline collaboration as part of the pandemic response. Two informants shared that they were accelerating the onboarding of new organizations since the start of the pandemic. In one community, organizations receiving disaster funds from their local United Way joined the platform to reduce duplication of services and facilitate coordination.

What’s Next?

The World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Less than a month later, community resource referral platform vendors are ramping up their resource directories, adding new assessment tools, and analyzing data to help local organizations. Early platform adopters are proving vital in keeping local resource information up to date and the platforms seem to be helping at least some communities mount a more coordinated response.

Once the immediate crisis passes, it will be important to assess more rigorously the impact these technologies had during the pandemic. Did communities that already had a platform in place mobilize more quickly and effectively? Did the platforms help families access the services they needed more efficiently? Did collaboration between platform vendors improve community coordination?

These, in turn, raise larger questions. What will be the role of these kinds of platforms in the growing landscape of cross-sector data infrastructure models, like community information exchanges? Are IT solutions to meet individual social needs supporting or supplanting grassroots organizing for structural policy change? We look forward to learning answers to these and other questions. To accelerate this process, we encourage both vendors and organizations using community resource referral platforms to share their experiences so that we can all learn how this kind of technological infrastructure can best be used to build a resilient and equitable health and social system in the post-pandemic era.


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