SDOH Buyer’s Guide Checklist: What’s in a Resource Directory?

Part One of Four

The following article is part of our Market Primer Series. It is based on an excerpt from our 2018 Social Innovation Technology Buyer’s Guide report.

For health care organizations, being able to identify the right resource for each patient means knowing which resources exist in the community.

Historically, this has been a paper-heavy, manual process aided by social workers, local non-profits and other organizations.

A recent report from the National Academy of Medicine describes one such effort:

“Compiling available resources involved hundreds of hours of accessing a variety of listing including binders of printed information, Rolodexes, Excel files, static web- sites, private databases, as well as interviewing social workers, resource specialists, and other professionals. In doing so, it became clear that there was limited collaboration among community agencies, many of which duplicated efforts by maintaining independent resource lists that were often incomplete and quickly out of date.”

Beyond the manual effort of developing these directories in-house, health systems face the long-tail issue of ongoing maintenance. Health insurers have shown a poor ability to maintain accurate…