#SystemsofCare

Improving Evaluation to Address Social Needs

View the Resource By Michelle Shumate The Leveraging Integrated Networks in Communities (LINC) to Address Social Needs Act, currently before Congress, addresses the lack of coordination between social service and health organizations. Through public-private partnerships, it offers states and regions incentives to use technology to equalize access to essential services. Section 3 of the proposed legislation focuses on evaluation, requiring the U.S. Comptroller General to assess service provider networks based on

Beyond Network Effectiveness: The Case for Network Efficiency and Accuracy

View the Resource By Zachary Gibson, Mariana Escallon-Barrios, Joshua-Paul Miles, Catherine Annis, Julia Carboni, Karen Smilowitz, Gilly Cantor, Nicholas Armstrong, Michelle Shumate Multi-service coordinated care networks are thought to improve access to care and accountability for human service organizations by centralizing knowledge management and referring clients to appropriate providers. The researchers investigate these referral networks’ performance by examining their accuracy at routing clients to the correct provider, their efficiency in

Facts and Flux: An Updated Review of Active Referral Technologies

Referral technologies are a rapidly increasing and adapting addition to care operations in the United States. Not only are present technologies constantly updating and adapting their practices, but new platforms are implemented into the care continuum on an ongoing and rolling basis. In 2019, Yuri Cartier, Caroline Fichtenberg, and Laura Gottlieb produced a comprehensive review of the present nine primary community resource referral platforms in their publication, “Community Resource Referral

The Future of Referral Data Metrics

Our last two blogs discussed the current state of referral metrics and the changes needed to optimize these metrics going forward. Now we will discuss the necessary data requirements for further improving the quality of care. While navigation systems track a breadth of data metrics, several untracked variables remain integral to the improvement of care. This blog advocates for three groups of outcome measures needed to assess the efficacy of

#SystemsofCare: What Is Cultural Competence, and How Can We Use It to Battle Health Inequality?

By Brett Mayfield Health disparities in the United States continue to be an area of focus for many nonprofits. In 2021, NNSI Founder and Director Michelle Shumate focused on this area herself, partnering with leading researchers from renowned medical institutions, namely NNSI’s neighbor organization Northwestern Medicine. Following research1-3 that found that Hispanic medical patients “receive disproportionately fewer living donor kidney transplants (LDKTs) than non-Hispanic Whites” (Gordon et al., 2021), these

Referral Data Metrics: What Is Lacking and How to Improve Data Practices Going Forward

Our previous blog, “Referral data metrics: what they are, what exists, and why they are important,” outlined the five data metrics that inform navigation systems: quality control metrics, demand metrics, supply metrics, referral metrics, and system impact metrics. If you haven’t read the previous entry, check it out first because this article extends this discussion of referral metrics. In this article, we describe essential improvements to metrics that are not