Our Expanding Commitment to North Carolina

The Findhelp network has been serving customers across the country for nearly a decade, and we’ve been partnering with organizations in North Carolina since 2016 to connect the individuals they serve to local, state, and national community social care resources and services. Read on to learn more about our vast statewide network of customers and community partners and how we’re collaborating and innovating with to improve health outcomes.

The North Carolina Landscape

Every state has its own unique challenges. According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS), these are some of the social care barriers facing North Carolinians:

More than 1.2 million North Carolinians are unable to find affordable housing.
North Carolina has the eighth-highest food insecurity in the U.S. (more than 1 in 5 children live in food-insecure households).
Nearly a quarter of North Carolina children have had adverse childhood experiences.
Nearly 1 in 2 women in North Carolina have experienced intimate partner violence.

To address these challenges, NCDHHS successfully applied for a Medicaid 1115 waiver and awarded a sole-source contract to a social care vendor. The approved waiver pilot is focused on high-need populations like individuals with significant behavioral health issues, children in foster care, and people struggling with substance use. Nearly four years into the Healthy Opportunities project (using the NCCare360 referral platform), things are still moving slowly. Without changes, especially to the referral process, North Carolinians in need of services could keep not getting the help they need (Forbes, North Carolina Health News, WRAL-Raleigh).

Complex Support to Address Complex Needs

At Findhelp, we have a history of successfully supporting 1115 waivers, facilitating invoices and payments, and supporting mental and behavioral health across industries and states.

We’ve built many platforms like NCCare360 that support comprehensive social care programs like Healthy Opportunities that are delivering value, expanding in scope, and sustaining funding to provide the best outcomes for individuals. What makes the difference? Experience designing and launching successful programs, a dedication to interoperability, support for CBO choice, and a fundamental commitment to privacy.

Prioritizing Privacy

Privacy is a cornerstone for both Findhelp and the customers we serve, as is protecting the dignity and safety of the people seeking services. Here’s how we think about the privacy of our users:

We believe in a consumer-directed privacy model, where individuals control who has access to their personal social care data through transparent, informed consent.
Organizations should be able to access social care information based on care coordination responsibilities, and sensitive or private referrals should remain private with the seeker having the choice to share (or not).
Data should not be sold or shared at the whim of vendors.

Getting these programs off the ground is complex; you need a partner who has done it before, and done it successfully.

Our Network in North Carolina

Organizations across industries continue to sign with Findhelp and use our platform to support their populations.

One of the reasons these organizations are choosing Findhelp is because we have an engaged network that’s already in place. Our network spans all 100 counties and North Carolinians across the state are using our platform to find and connect to needed services and support.

1,014,000+ users statewide
4,395,350+ searches statewide
9,779 listed programs serving North Carolina
1,770 claimed programs serving North Carolina

Findhelp’s data and analytic tools can identify gaps in services and provide actionable insights to inform public policy. For example, over the past two years, monthly users and searches on Findhelp’s network in North Carolina jumped 551% and 270% respectively, reflecting our important (and growing) role in connecting North Carolinians to local social assistance.

As of November 2023, we partner with more than 16 customer organizations throughout North Carolina to connect their patients, members, students, constituents, and clients to local resources. Below are highlights of how some of these organizations successfully partner and innovate with us to lift up their communities.

Building Trusted Networks of Community Partners

A successful and sustainable network requires that Findhelp, our customers, and community partners each have a seat at the table. These partnerships are the foundation for building Trusted Networks.

Trusted Networks allow Findhelp customers to prioritize specific community partners and highlight them in search results on their platform. This tight-knit network of priority partners helps establish deep, long-term relationships which lead to stronger outcomes for your seekers.

Atrium Health is a nationally-recognized leader in shaping health outcomes through innovative research, education and compassionate patient care. Based in Charlotte, North Carolina, Atrium Health is an integrated, nonprofit health system with more than 70,000 teammates serving patients at 40 hospitals and more than 1,400 care locations.

Atrium Health’s Community Resources Hub (powered by Findhelp) became available to the North Carolina community in 2018.
They launched a version of their Findhelp platform for their employees to self-navigate, and are currently implementing an advanced integration between Findhelp and their electronic health record, Epic, that will allow social care referrals to be placed from within a patient’s medical record.
Atrium Health has a very large geographic footprint and has partnered with Findhelp to build Trusted Networks of community partners in their different regions, leading to increased engagement and, in one of their focus regions, a referral response rate of 84%.
Below is a quote from one of Atrium’s Trusted Partners, the Cabarrus County Department of Human Services:

Novant Health is a multi-hospital system with more than 350 physician practices offering advanced medical treatment and headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Novant launched NHMyCommunity (powered by Findhelp) in 2018, and used Findhelp data to support their Health Equity Accreditation from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).
They provide integrated social care interventions for the patients based on screening results and connect patients to a tailored list of trusted resources in the regions that they serve.
Novant Health has developed Trusted Networks across all of their markets in North Carolina, reflecting their dedication to improving health and upward mobility through community programs and partnerships.

Expanding the Capacity of CBOs

Trusted Networks also provide a clear path for our customers to support community-based organizations (CBOs) through funding or other financial incentives, increasing the CBOs’ capacity and expanding their local impact.

As the only statewide nonprofit pharmacy in North Carolina, NC MedAssist provides prescription and over-the-counter medications at no cost to their neighbors in need. They believe that no one should ever have to choose between purchasing food or buying their medicine.

NC MedAssist faced a lot of difficulty in spreading the word about their organization. In order to get referrals, they would arrange meetings at hospitals and private practices, use billboard ads, and even go door-to-door in their community for people to learn about their services. These efforts were tedious and took away from the time they could have spent linking individuals to the medications they needed.
Since 2017, NC MedAssist has been using the Findhelp platform to receive referrals for uninsured and low-income individuals seeking pharmaceutical drugs throughout North Carolina.
Within one year of joining the Findhelp network, they saw a 2800% increase in referrals.

Serving Students Statewide

Schools want to help students achieve their academic goals and dreams, but social factors beyond the institutions’ control can have detrimental impacts on student success and graduation rates. Findhelp supports students at educational institutions around the country, from Ivy Tech in Indiana to Dallas Community College District in Texas.

North Carolina Community Colleges System (NCCCS) is focused on providing the best path to meet educational and career goals for aspiring academics and professionals across the state. They are the only public organization in North Carolina dedicated to providing affordable college access to anyone in the state. They have 58 community colleges serving 594,457 enrolled students.

NCCCS launched their Community College Resource Finder (powered by Findhelp) in 2019 with the goal of providing students, faculty, and staff with accessible and reliable information on social care resources to address food, housing, mental health, and more.
Colleges have seen student success rates increase by including the Resource Finder in staff workflows, in new student orientation materials, and providing ongoing support for current students.
NCCCS has added Findhelp search boxes on the website of individual member colleges to improve visibility into the barriers impacting each college’s unique population (example: Gaston College).
Colleges use the NCCCS platform to promote student access to on-campus services including on-campus food pantries, automotive repair, and financial assistance in addition to resources offered by community partners.

Supporting Mental & Behavioral Health

At Findhelp, we have a history of partnering with our customers to address the social needs of substance users and support mental and behavioral health. Our social needs assessments allow your staff navigators to identify an individual’s current needs, and our platform filters help users find specialty programs that adress substance use and mental or behavioral health challenges.

Eastpointe is a managed care organization dedicated to working with individuals and families in eastern North Carolina who struggle with substance abuse, mental health, and intellectual and developmental disabilities. They are committed to ensuring that no member falls through the cracks, and work side by side with providers and community partners to ensure their members have the medical, social, transitional, and vocational support they need.

Eastpointe launched their Social Network (powered by Findhelp) in 2020 and have partnered with us to support their care management and community education.
They conduct outreach to community agencies, licensed independent practitioners, and hospitals who help the uninsured and those on Medicaid get comprehensive, effective treatment. This is accomplished through a number of initiatives where their Findhelp platform is also promoted, including:
- Convening social care providers who serve Eastpointe members
- Participation in coalitions and collaboratives across all 10 counties (focus areas: mental health, crisis intervention, substance use, senior support, school mental health, and rural health)
- Mental health first aid training
- Crisis intervention training for first responders
- Activities, events, and training aligned with awareness months (e.g. Mental Health Awareness Month in May)

Our Ongoing Support for North Carolina

Findhelp is modernizing America’s social safety net for anyone who needs help or helps others. With the largest network of community-based organizations and a Best in KLAS closed-loop referral system, Findhelp is the fastest and most reliable way to get help with privacy and dignity.

We’re investing in North Carolina communities for the long term and are committed to ensuring that individuals connect to the resources that they need. We believe that community organizations and service providers should be able to work within their chosen systems of record, to choose which systems they want to integrate with, and have control over who has access to see their data.

Findhelp’s expanding commitment to North Carolina includes continuing to advocate for our customers, community partners, and people in need across the region and welcoming the state of North Carolina and other institutions to discuss an inclusive approach to interoperability, focusing on data sharing standards that allow us all to be good stewards of the information entrusted to us. We’re excited to continue expanding our North Carolina network of customers and CBOs to modernize the safety net for all.

Partner With Us!

If you’d like to learn more about how we partner with organizations like these both in North Carolina and nationwide and can support your goals, connect with our team.