We believe that prioritizing the privacy and dignity of individuals seeking care is fundamental to the mission we share with our partners across communities. To that end, we’re sharing our vision of the rights we believe all individuals should have with respect to their social care information—and how all partners in this work can advance our shared goals to enable secure and seamless access to care. 

Unite Us has built our solution to center our core principles of privacy and dignity and these five fundamental rights for every person seeking care. Our platform features a robust consent process that is centered around the person seeking care. The consent form is translated into over forty languages and available in multiple formats to promote accessibility. We designed this consent model to protect client privacy and alleviate the challenges people face when seeking services. When accessing services through providers coordinating through our platform, individuals have the right to know what information is collected from their providers, the right to consent to the sharing of their information, the right to correct their information, the right to revoke consent to sharing their information, and the right to delete their information. 

In addition to these fundamental rights, individuals seeking care should trust that their information will be protected and secure. At Unite Us, we protect all social care information as though it were protected health information, employing the same security measures required by HIPAA for all data on our platform, regardless of where it originates. We also provide heightened protections for information subject to 42 CFR Part 2 and other federal and state protections, enabling providers that have historically been siloed to collaborate with their partners and improve outcomes. Our partners have welcomed this opportunity to securely connect across sectors: 

“Normally, we are not able to use any other platforms because they could jeopardize the safety of survivors of gender-based violence. Not being able to receive and make referrals through other platforms kept us siloed. This is the first community-based referral connector system that we’ve ever seen that would meet our qualifications and ensure survivor safety. Unite Us worked closely with us to ensure that this platform could work for our population. This partnership creates more referral pathways for healthcare and other community-based organizations to connect survivors to our services that might not have otherwise been referred.” – Executive Director of a Community Provider Serving Survivors of Domestic and Interpersonal Violence in Oregon

By providing the technology and resources to support secure coordination across sectors, we alleviate the burdens imposed on resource-constrained providers serving our communities. 

When we develop new features for our solutions, we always take into account community feedback to ensure that the individuals in need of care and community partners serving them are heard. We listen to our community partners to reflect our shared vision to promote seamless access to care that centers the individual. As one community partner shared: 

“Unite Us has successfully and easily linked families with whom I work and resources specific for their needs. I recently had a family with a variety of needs. The mother and her two children were living in a car but were able to get a home through a community program. Unfortunately, they did not have any furniture, lighting, clothing, or household goods. The mother was also interested in assistance in obtaining childcare and a job. The mother agreed to me entering her information into the Unite Us Platform. It took about five minutes or so. The mother was sent a text message from the program, where she had to give electronic permission for Unite Us to disseminate her information to the resources I had chosen. Within 24 hours, she was linked to a potential employer, financial resources, and community resources to meet their concrete needs. The mother has been so grateful for the resources and assistance.” – Social Worker in West Virginia

These five fundamental rights—coupled with solutions that protect social care information under the same strict protections required for protected health information—protect individuals’ privacy and help ensure that their social care needs are addressed. 

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Our vision remains the same all these later: building a world of connected communities to improve people’s health and well-being. Our mission, however, is evolving as our scope expands beyond connecting health and social care. Our work has brought government, community, healthcare, and other change agents to the table. Working across sectors, our solutions establish a new standard of care that identifies and predicts social care needs, connects people to services, and leverages meaningful outcomes data to further drive community investment. It’s our new mission to unlock the potential of every community.

At our 10-year mark, we reflect on the effort, partnerships, and innovation that have brought us to this remarkable moment. One lesson stands out above all others: We are better together. We can’t imagine any of our successes without our shared vision and collective effort. Together, across health, government, and community, we amplify our strengths, compound our assets, and deliver sustainable impact for generations to come. Thank you for being a part of our history and our promising future.

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For government and nonprofit organizations, the outlook is just as dismal: Government worker shortages continue to worsen crisis response, while the nonprofit sector is facing historically high rates of burnout (30 percent on average) and turnover—in part due to operational inefficiencies. 

For any healthcare provider, government, or nonprofit looking to save time and unnecessary costs, it’s worth taking a closer look at how to more effectively use the many systems that fill their employees’ day-to-day lives. 

That’s where Unite Us comes in. Unite Us’ end-to-end solution establishes a new standard of care that identifies social care needs in communities, helps enroll people in services, and leverages meaningful outcomes data to further drive community investment. 

Over the past year, we’ve talked to hundreds of organizations, hosted discovery sessions with customers, and ultimately worked together to build a product that we’re excited to officially announce: our Salesforce Integration, an application that gives organizations an easy way to send secure, electronic referrals for social services using the Unite Us Platform within their existing Salesforce workflow. 

Who is the Unite Us Salesforce Integration for? 

Case managers, care coordinators, social workers, and those who send social care referrals at local government agencies, healthcare providers, community-based organizations, nonprofits, and other organizations using Salesforce to manage client information. 

Key Features of Our Salesforce Integration:

• Easy launch point to open Unite Us app directly within Salesforce 
• Automatic integration of client demographic information into Unite Us
• Conducting social care screenings for a client
• Easy insight into which organizations are accepting referrals, what types of services they provide, client eligibility, and more.  

Benefits of Our Salesforce Integration:

• Securely coordinate and communicate with organizations across sectors while tracking outcomes and services provided by community partners—all from directly within Salesforce.
• Integrate your Unite Us workflow seamlessly into your existing Salesforce workflow—saving time, reducing the potential for data entry errors, and ultimately helping clients get connected to the services they need.
• Create cases and send referrals from directly within Salesforce.
• Launch directly into the specific client record in Unite Us with an automatic integration of client demographic information from Salesforce.

How can my organization get the Unite Us Salesforce Integration?

The Unite Us Platform is available in Salesforce through the Salesforce AppExchange. Reach out to your Unite Us representative or request a demo to learn more. 

Unite Us looks forward to continuing to share regular product updates in the future as we work hand in hand with our partners to connect clients to the best possible resources in the community. 

Interested in learning more? Request a demo to find out how the Salesforce App can fit into your care coordination program today. 

The post Introducing Our New Salesforce Integration appeared first on uniteus.com.

Medicaid leaders across the country are aligning around a common vision of a more person-centered Medicaid program that addresses social drivers of health (SDoH), improves coordination of care, and invests in health-related social needs (HRSN). To make this vision a reality, states need new tools and technology to facilitate collaboration, to measure person-level outcomes and system impact, and to drive accountability across sectors and providers. Addressing HRSN and the broader SDoH also requires deep community engagement and cross-sector partnerships of the providers and community-based organizations (CBOs) that are committed to delivering whole-person care. 

 At Unite Us, we combine technology infrastructure with supported community infrastructure to break down silos across sectors and government programs. Through Unite Us’ interoperable referral platform—which uses an electronic master person index to empower cross-sector care teams and evaluate individuals’ longitudinal community care journeys—we create seamless system linkages and closed-loop workflows across historically fragmented systems of care. The common platform we provide supports a true “any door” system of social care, produces system-wide analytics to measure social needs and community capacity at scale, and helps government leaders strategically shift investments upstream to maximize health benefits and better manage government spending. 

Addressing HRSNs and SDoH through Medicaid Managed Care 

Medicaid programs across the country are updating quality measures, establishing new care management requirements, and testing innovative risk modeling to encourage a greater focus on SDoH amongst managed care plans. Shared end-to-end SDoH technology infrastructure can break down access and quality gaps between coverage options. It also standardizes approaches to program oversight by using common measurement, data, and systems to identify members’ needs, facilitate effective outreach, engage members in services, track member- and system-level outcomes, and facilitate investments in needed community-based services. 

Nationwide, Unite Us’ end-to-end SDoH data and technology suite provides a blueprint for plans and Medicaid programs to proactively leverage SDoH data and infrastructure to drive measurable health outcomes and return on investment. 

States Taking The Lead

1. Quality Measures: Through their recently approved 1115 waiver demonstration, Oregon Healthcare Authority (OHA) redesigned its quality incentive program to include a new health equity upstream metric, “Social Determinants of Health: Social Needs Screening and Referral,” which incentivizes managed care plans not only to measure but also address HRSNs. The evolution of quality improvement measures related to SDoH is also being driven by leading healthcare quality standard entities, such as the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). The Social Need Screening and Intervention (SNS-E) measures are included in NCQA’s 2023 updated Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) quality measure slate. With this newly established measure, health plans can be evaluated on their ability to screen and provide interventions for members with housing, food insecurity, and transportation needs.

2. Care Management Programs: In Mississippi, managed care plans will be required to implement comprehensive care management programs inclusive of SDoH screening, risk stratification, and trackable closed-loop referrals. These requirements underpin a program-wide commitment to advancing health equity that is financially incentivized through minimum investment requirements in SDoH, as well as Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) allowances for costs associated with closed-loop referral platforms.

3. Risk Modeling: Incorporating social needs data into quality and risk adjustment programs is another important trend that ensures adequate funding is allocated to manage members’ social care needs. MassHealth, the Massachusetts state Medicaid agency, developed its medical risk adjustment model for managed care organizations (MCOs) and accountable care organizations (ACOs) by incorporating data found to be associated with heightened SDoH needs. The updated model considers age, unstable housing, a “neighborhood stress” score, disability, serious mental illness, and substance use disorders.

Shifting Investments Upstream

Through Medicaid waivers and other reinvestment initiatives, state Medicaid programs are advancing new initiatives to address HRSNs by directly funding CBOs that traditionally have not been financed by healthcare. The implementation challenge that states now face is how to create streamlined billing and reporting infrastructure for social care providers without over-medicalizing the delivery of needed community-level services. 

Implementation efforts for these initiatives must include a plan for supporting and reimbursing CBOs that provide health-related social services to create adequate capacity. In many instances, CBOs’ existing systems and workflows do not generate service-level invoices, manage reimbursements, or track outcomes. This is particularly true for smaller CBOs, which are often best positioned to serve vulnerable populations. These smaller CBOs and the populations they serve are likely to be left behind if states and health plans don’t provide them with the tools and support they need to participate. As Medicaid programs increasingly adopt requirements for connecting members to community partners, they must also invest in the protocols and technology needed to strengthen CBO capacity, including those needed for rate setting, reimbursement, and reporting.

With Unite Us Payments, CBOs can streamline service tracking and billing for social care services provided. Medicaid agencies using Unite Us Payments can track the flow of CBO funding and pair reimbursement with outcomes data to better understand impact and return on investment. Unite Us also generates data and insights, like our Health Equity dashboard, to provide our partners with actionable information that they can use to target resources and interventions to address local priorities, such as health disparities and inequities in access to care. 

Opportunities for Cross-Sector, Interagency Partnerships 

As state Medicaid programs take the lead in promoting statewide coordinated care networks, local government and other agencies need coordinated care networks to address priority populations and advance specific policy objectives. In a mature network, Medicaid programs improve coordination across agencies to support multi-system members, including foster children, justice-involved individuals, people with substance use disorders, or children with special health care needs. Establishing reusable statewide SDoH infrastructure to advance community-level care coordination is core to Medicaid’s role as a safety net coverage option. Statewide plans to invest in SDoH technology as part of a state’s Medicaid Enterprise Systems strategy can include more than just the healthcare delivery system by engaging a cross-agency governance team to proactively set system-wide priorities and needs across multiple at-risk populations. 

Unite Us is the only SDoH technology vendor that has scaled statewide with government partners. We leverage a robust, cross-sector planning and community engagement methodology to ensure that government partners maximize state and federal investments through regular access to, and use of, key SDoH indicators collected through our robust structured outcome taxonomy and standard data visualizations. 

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I was 19 years old when I deployed to Afghanistan for my first combat tour. It was unlike anything I ever experienced—from going on convoy missions to being mortared on our fobs. Experiencing war up close and personal takes a toll on your mental health. In the early 2000s, mental health wasn’t widely discussed like it is today. In the Army, we had mandatory training on suicide prevention and behavioral health facilities, but there was an unspoken rule that, as a leader, seeking these resources could have a negative impact on your career. So, like many of my battle buddies back then, I sucked it up and drove on. As the military culture started to shift and more leaders spoke out about addressing mental health, it gave me the courage I needed to address my own anxiety and seek professional help, which helped me become more effective at my job and as a leader. 

Like many veterans, as my time ended with the Army, I started to think about life after the military. Where would I go? What would I do? How would my skill set translate to the corporate or private sector? What company could understand my military background and experience?

Then I came across Unite Us, a technology company that connected health and social care. After reading more about the company, I learned that the founders were also veterans. Was this destiny? A company whose values aligned with mine, who understood my skill set, and understood my background from the past 20 years of Army experience. I applied, and after a thorough interview process, I was offered the position of Communications Manager. I couldn’t have selected a better organization to join in my next chapter. Unite Us’ mission to advance health equity gave me purpose once again.

During my time here, I have seen Unite Us’ commitment to connecting veterans to health and social care firsthand, especially behavioral health services. In September 2022, Unite Us was selected among the top 30 finalists in Mission Daybreak, a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs grand challenge and call on innovators to develop suicide prevention solutions that meet the diverse needs of veterans. We are honored to join the innovation efforts to reduce barriers for veterans to access care.

How SDoH Tech Supports Veterans Through Whole-Person Care

Unite Us’ technology makes it easier for veterans to receive support before a mental health crisis occurs. Our solution, Saving Veteran Lives Through Empowered Community Networks, is designed to reduce veteran suicides by identifying the social care needs of veterans who present risk factors for suicide, enrolling those veterans in services, and ensuring those veterans receive services that meet their social care needs.

A holistic approach to mental health requires the ability to address both medical and social needs, and to integrate services that address a range of co-occurring needs. Data from our networks shows that the top three co-occurring needs for military members and veterans seeking mental and behavioral health services between 2017 and 2022 were 1) Housing; 2) Benefits Navigation; and 3) Employment. 

Addressing these needs takes an integrated, well-resourced team of collaborators. One of our partners, Cristina Garcia, Director of VPAN Los Angeles at Southern California Grantmakers, shared, “Unite Us has helped connect a disconnected society. Almost 60 veteran organization partners in LA County means that together we are accomplishing more, decreasing veteran issues that were once difficult to overcome. Unite Us is helping VPAN achieve our mission by bringing a coordinated network that provides us not only a platform but a new method of access to care for our veterans and families in LA County.”

Because network partners on the Unite Us Platform can securely screen for and easily coordinate care for additional and recurring services, the client never has to tell their story more than once. This results in significant efficiency improvements. In Georgia, Unite Us’ partnership with the Veterans Education Career Transition Resource (VECTR) helped drive a 300-percent reduction in the time it takes receiving organizations to close the case. We observe consistent results in serving our veteran population across the nation, with time to case closure more than halved on average from 2020 to 2022 in our networks.

Supporting Veterans on the Path to Self-Sufficiency

As someone who recently transitioned from the military, the information the Army provides you on your way out can be overwhelming. This can be difficult, and some veterans experience challenges reintegrating into civilian life—including employment, homelessness, and mental health-related needs. There are networks of resources available, like the ones Unite Us supports, to help veterans reintegrate and get on the path to self-sufficiency. 

I believe veterans and servicemembers are the backbone of our country. Celebrating their lives and sacrifices is an honor, and advocating for them is a privilege. Today, we commemorate the sacrifices of those who continue to carry the wounds, both mentally and physically, from their fight for the cause of freedom, liberty, and justice. I’m always aware of how fortunate I was to make it back home. Serving alongside some of the most heroic soldiers our country has ever seen, I am honored to be amongst the one percent that raised their hand to protect our nation’s freedoms. 

Learn more about Unite Us 

The post The Perfect Fit: A Veteran Who Found Her Place in the Civilian Workforce appeared first on uniteus.com.

Reflecting on the event, Georgina shared, “We should all be more motivated than ever to transform the way we think about food and health. In order to end hunger in America, we must recognize the role of hunger with cultural sensitivity, or we all further the inequities that plague our communities. We owe it to our youth to make sure they never experience hunger again. Now is the time to all step up and do our part, and Unite Us is proud to continue leading by example, hand in hand with our partners!” As a vocal supporter of the importance of food security for students and families, her passion lights a spark within us all.

Empowering Organizations Through SDoH Technology

In various sessions throughout the conference, Unite Us was mentioned for the role our solution plays in breaking down silos that prevent community members from accessing vital resources such as nutritious food.

In one example, our partner Shavana Howard, Assistant Secretary of Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services shared, “Most people come to our state agency because they want food stamps or they want cash benefits, or they just need help. Oftentimes, what we’re able to give them is approval for food stamps or approval for cash assistance, but we can’t address the child care, we can’t address the housing crisis or challenges that they have, even connecting to schools. So we’ve worked with United Way and 2-1-1 to actually roll out the Unite Us Platform, where all of our staff will actually have access to address those other needs. So instead of saying ‘you can pick up the phone and call this place,’ they can actually send a referral directly to that ZIP code in which that individual lives, so that they actually can get the resources and support they need.”

As Shavana explained, it is critical to take the burden to find resources off of the community member and instead empower providers to securely communicate and track outcomes, proving when a person receives the help they need. Watch her full remarks here.

Another major theme at the conference was the need to reimburse community-based organizations for addressing SDoH needs, like food and nutrition. States like North Carolina and California were recognized as having proven that such efforts at scale can work. Unite Us is proud to be the technology backbone for North Carolina’s $550 million investment in reimbursing CBOs for these and similar services.

Recognition at the event was both unexpected and heartening, further emphasizing the trust and buy-in which Unite Us has earned from our cross-sector partners in 44 states.  This is what happens when you create a tool that empowers community members to address disparities and meet the social needs of the underserved.

Our Continued Commitment to Nutrition and Health

Now, the Biden-Harris Administration has released a fact sheet of commitments supporting the five pillars of the conferences, which listed Unite Us as a participant. To support the “Integrate Nutrition and Health” pillar, Unite Us has joined the Sync for Social Needs coalition, a select group of leading health technology companies and health systems, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, to standardize the sharing of patient data on social determinants of health, including food insecurity.

Members commit to collectively evaluate and pilot the integration of specific social screening tools in electronic medical record systems. In addition, the leading healthcare standards-setting bodies will commit to working with participants to scale these approaches, further lowering the clinician burden to screen for social needs. The group will kick off a six-week discovery sprint, which will determine a design for an initial pilot through which screening data will be shared.

“As the nation’s leading cross-sector collaboration platform, we are excited to bring our expertise in demonstrating how the secure sharing of standardized social care data is being done at scale,” said Dan Brillman, CEO and Co-Founder of Unite Us. “We believe the true value of screening data is valuable when coupled with data-driven actions within communities that result in outcomes and improved health. We look forward to driving this initiative forward, leveraging work already being done with Unite Us across the country, and supporting the work needed to evolve the industry.”

Unite Us joins the member organizations committed to the initiative, which includes BayCare, Epic, Geisinger, Graphite Health, Higi, HL7 International, Meditech, National Committee for Quality Assurance, National Quality Forum, Oracle-Cerner, Riverside Health System, Rush University System for Health, Saffron Labs, Sanford Health, SCAN Health Plan, SSM Health, The Joint Commission, Tufts Medicine, and XanthosHealth.

In the months ahead, we look forward to sharing our expertise and participating in critical conversations with fellow members.

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