Overview

OSF Community Connect utilizes social determinants of health as a critical component to create better patient care plans, track patient outcomes, and achieve measurable improvements in the health outcomes of communities.  It leverages data to link OSF HealthCare to people who are most in need of assistance.  And it helps establish care connections for prevention, treatment, and surveillance.  More specifically, social determinants of health have been the driving data for some of the programs Clarity has created and is in the process of creating for Community Connect.

Years of background research to uncover unmet needs in our communities led us to propose the OSF Community Connect solution. We then trained our teams to quickly and effectively develop, test and implement the platform. This allowed our diverse team to focus on a single, shared vision – to improve health in the communities we serve, especially for those in greatest need. - Jon Handler, MD and Senior Fellow at OSF Innovation

Clarity’s Continuing Role

After redesigning the OSF Community Connect app to extend the program’s capabilities and account for potential use cases, Clarity has continued to add features to it, including:

  • The ability for users to curate data via work lists to customize what information they see for various purposes such as geographical location, etc.
  • Automated workflows including program enrollment, SMS outreach, and receiving survey response feedback
  • Forms now have numerical input, dropdowns, multiselects, and option for signature capture, improving user experience
  • Data from automated responses appears in user dashboard for interpretation and application
  • Access and account management for smaller, partner health care organizations

Impact to Community Connect’s Evolution

Clarity has provided the technical expertise to bring OSF’s vision for Community Connect to life.  As the wants and needs continue to evolve, Clarity will provide guidance to OSF’s team in order for Community Connect to continue to adapt to the needs of its users.

Like many other industries, health care is undergoing a fundamental change in how leaders make decisions about everything from finances to patient care.  At the forefront of this shift is the role of data.  Acquisition of new and old types of information and determining how to use them are of the utmost importance to not only find health care solutions, but to generate more complex questions.

As OSF HealthCare reimagines its use of data, participation in collaborative communities, made up of academia, government, industry, and non-profit organizations will be a necessity.  The scale of available data far surpasses the resources of any one organization to ingest and find value.  While challenging, this new world provides ample opportunity to improve and innovate how OSF HealthCare delivers care.

Looking Forward

Clarity continues to work in a technical project lead role, overseeing OSF’s internal team as they build out programs for new use cases for Community Connect.  Our junior developers are also working alongside OSF to help build these enhancements.

Once such initiative currently being built is Cancer Navigator.  In this program, once a patient is diagnosed, Cancer Navigator pairs the patient with a liaison that guides them through the stages of care.  This started as pilot, built out by OSF under the technical guidance of Clarity.  Community Connect is being used to manage this process.  The goal is to use OCC and all of its data to get the holistic picture of patients for the liaisons and where they are within their treatment.

Stay tuned for more information regarding Clarity’s role alongside OSF HealthCare and their continued vision for Community Connect.

 

References:

https://www.osfinnovation.org/invent/innovation-labs/data-science-and-advanced-informatics