No two people needing health and human services are exactly alike, or require the same acute levels of care. This is because, often, seemingly separate social challenges can greatly impact how individuals receive health care or social services.

Take for example, an individual who does not have access to safe housing and is not in one place for more than a few days at a time. Or perhaps an individual has literacy challenges because they were never formally educated.

These outside factors that can play a role in an individual’s wellbeing or ability to receive services are referred to as social determinants of health (SDOH) and they cannot be ignored in the provision of comprehensive health and human services. Together, with our longtime partners the Administration for Community Living (ACL), we are working on an interoperability solution that will create a better understanding of the social needs of individuals with varying vulnerabilities.

Across the country, human service resource directories have developed their own proprietary Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enable data sharing. Although effective, this method of information sharing is fragmented and inefficient. Today, we are actively working on development of an adoptable model in response to the ACL “Challenge: Innovative Technology Solutions for Social Care Referrals” project.

This work entails the development of a Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR)-based Implementation Guide (IG) that organizations may use to expose their service provider directories and facilitate mapping through established standards, with the hope of enhancing social care referrals and exchange of information across the health and social care sectors.

The new FHIR IG will allow IT systems (including electronic health record systems) used by health care providers, consumers, and social service organizations to query a directory of participants in a social services network to identify which organizations can provide services that address their immediate needs, along with the locations at which those services may be provided.

FEI has developed a reference implementation of this guide, participated in a FHIR testing event and demonstrated the FHIR API to query a human services directory. We have submitted the IG to the Health Level 7 (HL7), standards development organization for healthcare standards, for commentary. FEI is part of the human and social services (HSS) workgroup for HL7. We will continue to support ACL in finalizing this IG as well as for other initiatives to enhance interoperability and healthcare standards adoption in the human/social services domain. Our goal continues to be fostering information sharing to help individuals locate and receive the appropriate services when they need help the most.