How to Turn Information into Intervention: Insights from Activate Care Customers

In 2019, Activate Care began to share a different kind of message. For decades, the public health sector has recognized the importance of social determinants of health. Only in recent years has this viewpoint permeated the worlds of healthcare delivery, health insurance, and health policy. We called this development the beginning of the SDOH Era.

Only in the past five years have the social determinants of health exploded into this realm of widespread recognition. The trend isn’t going away anytime soon. The SDOH Era can be thought of as a defining period in the evolution of the industry, and we think we are about five years into what will be a 20-year business cycle. Healthcare industry stakeholders and their partners in social services who are looking to improve population health outcomes and reduce total cost of care need to understand what the SDOH Era means today in order to successfully find a place within it. 

In the SDOH Era, community collaboration is the key to driving lasting change. Care coordination technology has the power to transform patient relationships, but organizations have only started to tap its true potential. What we think worked in the previous decade for SDOH will not work in the 2020s because our understanding of how to engage communities in social interventions has scaled up dramatically.

It’s not enough to close the loop on a referral or even develop a shared care plan. So what will work?

In 2021, Activate Care is excited to take the lead in changing the standard of care in community health innovation and social intervention. This is why we announced a first of its kind initiative to help communities change how local health and social service systems collaborate and the impact that communities can achieve together.

Activate Care’s Screen-to-Intervene™ Initiative is engaging communities in all 50 states in an effort to link systems of care around the individual patient or client, rather than just the activities of the care coordinator or case manager. This initiative builds on our evidence-based CareHub™ offering, the only technology proven to help health and social service organizations reduce costs and collaborate for the collective benefit of the person being served, and ultimately the community as a whole.

Trying to change outcomes in your community? Become a Screen-to-Intervene leader with others in your state.

Based on our eight years in the SDOH field, here at Activate Care we take the view that community collaboration is a social determinant of health, it is the social factor that we address directly with our technology platform, and it’s the social factor which predicts the influence of all the other social factors combined. Said another way, communities that collaborate effectively produce healthier people.

To this effort, the Activate CareHub™ platform brings expanded data exchange capabilities, allowing communities to “screen anywhere” across the ecosystem, with enhanced care coordination tools to link diverse teams together to “intervene everywhere” in order to meet a person’s whole set of medical and physical, behavioral health, and social service needs. Coordinating care in ways that help care teams to actually intervene until the problem has been rectified reduces everything from hospital readmissions to chronic homelessness.

Our upcoming SDOH MasterClass webinar -- Five Screen-to-Intervene Stories: Insights in Transformation from Activate Care Customers -- will showcase five examples from across the country, highlighting individuals who took the lead on mobilizing their communities to coordinate care in new ways. Register for the webinar to learn their stories, including:

• Why multiple California counties implemented a common care coordination platform for their SDOH strategy
  
  
• How Detroit is mobilizing to leverage Activate Care for healthcare and social service use cases
  
  
• Best practices from Boston’s safety-net organizations for building an advanced community-based telehealth program
  
  
• How Oregon's next-generation Medicaid managed care organizations are learning how to integrate medical, behavioral, and dental care for vulnerable populations
  
  
• How hospitals in large systems like Providence St. Joseph Health are rethinking the role of community benefits in their modern SDOH strategies