United Way for Southeastern Michigan and its partners are working to develop infrastructure that enables organizations, agencies, and sectors to share information and coordinate care planning that creates better experiences for people accessing services. Our efforts to develop this infrastructure, referred to as a Community Information Exchange (CIE™), center on the recognition that the health and social services sector lacks the capacity, resources, and technology required to work with clients and individuals across organizations and different programs. Even though each sector and agency may work well individually, they are part of a greater system that is disjointed and complex for both community members and for agencies, a system that lacks deep coordination and shared care planning, and that is better set up to react to current situations that plan for future care.
What we and our partners are trying to do is build an infrastructure that knits the health and social services system together in a way that works better for people, and we are doing so by following the best practice model laid out by 2-1-1 San Diego’s CIE™. At its core, a CIE™ is a network of partners in the health and social services sectors who have partnered together to coordinate care for persons in need of assistance. These partners are committed to a collective approach to care and to working better together in service of the community. A CIE™ helps partners communicate with one another and contribute information to a shared care plan. It supports proactive care planning by enabling partners to share individual demographic and program enrollment information, get notified of significant events, and helps provide organizations a better understanding of the ecosystem they’re operating in. But at the end of the day, a CIE™ helps to create a better experience for community members.
There are many core capabilities of a CIE™, including its network partners, shared language, closed loop and bi-directional referrals, and data integration. All these capabilities work together to drive and deliver enhanced community care planning. While we are currently building and testing individual CIE™ capabilities, such as in our Closing the Loop project where we are testing the ability of a referring agency to receive information back from a servicing agency about an individual they referred for services, there is work to do to understand the current landscape of data sharing and care coordination in the health and social services sector.
United Way for Southeastern Michigan requests submissions from qualified professionals to conduct qualitative, in-depth interviews with major stakeholders in the health and social services sector within southeast Michigan, including but not limited to child care, public health, housing, and economic mobility.
Purpose: To develop a robust CIE™, a community first needs to understand how local organizations currently coordinate care and the challenges they are experiencing, as well as the social, economic, political, and technological events and trends shaping local coordination efforts. The stakeholder interviews will help us understand the state of multi-sector data sharing initiatives aimed at improving community health and what agencies’ comfortability and desires are regarding data sharing, data sharing agreements, and participation in shared care planning.
Topics of discussion during the environmental scan include:
Data Asset Map: An in-depth assessment of where data is collected, stored, and shared across systems to understand the flow of persons through multiple systems.
Data Sharing Agreements: All partners use standard agreements that meet information exchange requirements.
Common Agenda: All participants have a shared vision for change that includes a common understanding of the program and joint approach to solving the problem through agreed upon actions.
We anticipate this work to occur over a period of 6-8 months. Award amounts will be determined solely at United Way’s discretion after review and evaluation of the proposals received that fulfill the proposed scope of work. The term of the contract, fees for services, and total contract amount will be negotiated between United Way and the chosen contractor.
Proposals should be submitted via email as attachments, in Word or PDF format. The proposals should include the following components: