Minnesota Social Care Summit: Highlights from the North Star State
Last week we gathered in Minnesota for our Regional Summit—a day dedicated to building stronger connections between healthcare providers, community-based organizations (CBOs), and social care leaders. Together, we explored what it takes to create a more integrated, sustainable network of support for Minnesotans.
Throughout the day, speakers and attendees shared both the challenges and the innovations shaping their work. From addressing behavioral health gaps in rural communities to experimenting with new referral workflows, the summit highlighted the creativity and collaboration driving Minnesota’s social care landscape forward.
In this post, you’ll learn:
How Essentia Health is tackling the behavioral health crisis in rural Minnesota, achieving a 94% closed-loop referral rate
Practical strategies from both a health system and a CBO on using data and process improvements to strengthen their collaborative network
The critical steps Minnesota leaders are taking to address CBO capacity
Highlights from the 2025 Minnesota Social Care Summit
This year’s Summit featured 27 participants from 16 organizations across Minnesota, representing health plans, health care providers, nonprofits, and more.
A sincere thank you to all our speakers and attendees for a day filled with candid conversation and a shared commitment to strengthening the social safety net for every Minnesotan. It’s clear that the spirit of collaboration is strong in the North Star State.
Below are some of the key themes and takeaways from a day of learning and discussion.
A vision for trust and integration
The day began by addressing a foundational element of any connected network: trust. In a discussion about data privacy, participants expressed concern about how they can ensure people’s information is safe.
Findhelp’s coalition model offers one answer. Already in use across eight states, it allows individuals to choose exactly which organizations can view their referrals—contrasting with “all-in” consent models used elsewhere. This approach puts control in the hands of the individual, ensuring privacy while still fostering collaboration among partners.
Closing the loop on behavioral health: Essentia Health’s blueprint
One of the most pressing topics of the day was the significant gap in behavioral health (BH) access, especially across northern and rural Minnesota, where wait times for an appointment can stretch to six months. Our partners at Essentia Health shared their innovative and determined approach to closing this gap.
Facing challenges of long wait times, shifting provider networks, and capacity constraints, Essentia took action.
They built a comprehensive directory on their platform that includes all available BH resources to ensure their care coordinators had a complete view of available services.
Findhelp partnered with the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) to roll out a statewide behavioral health program locator—Find Help Minnesota—enabling organizations to seamlessly coordinate referrals and expand access to critical mental and behavioral health resources.
With more than 3,500 employees placing referrals through their Findhelp platform, Essentia has worked to ensure behavioral health resources are visible and accessible—even in rural and northern Minnesota, where a simple appointment can mean a six-month wait.
Attendees were eager to learn how these workflows played out in practice, asking questions about integrating screeners directly into Epic and managing duplication across systems. The discussion underscored both the complexity and the promise of making behavioral health referrals smarter and more effective.
Essentia Health’s partnership with behavioral health provider Nystrom & Associates, combined with process improvements, boosted their closed-loop referral rate significantly. They went from a 72% rate to a 94% rate—in just one year.
Key successes and takeaways:
- Powerful Partnerships: Essentia forged a deep partnership with Nystrom & Associates, a key behavioral health provider.
- Impressive Outcomes: Through process improvements and dedicated community engagement, they dramatically increased their closed-loop referral rate on the project from 72% to an 94% in the last year.
- A Scalable Model: The success sparked a conversation about packaging Essentia’s curated BH directory as a specialty network—a feature other health systems could simply “toggle on” to provide immediate, comprehensive BH resources to their teams.
Building a collaborative network: Strategies from Fairview Health Services and The Food Group
Our next session focused on the strategies behind building and sustaining strong partnerships, featuring perspectives from both a major health system and a vital CBO.
Fairview Health Services detailed their thoughtful approach to integrating Findhelp. By tailoring workflows to different roles—clinicians, care coordinators, and inpatient/outpatient teams—they’ve created a system that balances efficiency with depth. For example:
- Clinicians access priority resource lists that appear on Epic after-visit summaries (including QR codes).
- Care coordinators dive deeper into Findhelp searches, supported by screener data that auto-fills resource recommendations.
Social care program accountability
Fairview also emphasized the importance of accountability to drive programmatic success:
- Each program they’ve launched includes an evaluation plan and partner surveys.
- They established community advisory committees for every hospital service area.
Using Findhelp’s analytics dashboard, Fairview is already tracking referrals, claimed programs, and baseline data to shape their 2026 goals, strategically focusing on building CBO partnerships where the need is greatest.
A core challenge: CBO capacity
A critical theme emerged from this discussion: as health systems get better at screening and referring, how do we support the CBOs now facing increased demand, especially as grants and other funding sources tighten?
The group engaged in a transparent conversation about creative solutions, from Essentia’s model of directly paying CBO partners for their work through an Incentivized Trusted Network to an exciting discussion between Essentia and Fairview about pooling resources to jointly build CBO capacity.
From a CBO perspective, The Food Group shared how they measure success and adapt to growing demand, as healthcare partnerships have doubled their referrals in the past year.
To manage this influx, they analyzed their outreach process. By simply adding a fourth attempt to follow-up with individuals (text, call, call, email), they boosted their connection rate by 15%, ensuring more people received the help they needed.
A more connected future
The day wrapped up with a forward-looking discussion about the tools and features that will continue to power this work:
- Two-way texting with CBOs to streamline communication.
- Eligibility verification and how integrations could reduce barriers for clients.
- Reimbursement models, including the potential of Z Codes, to quantify and sustain social care interventions.
- Specialty networks like AIDA’s post-acute care network and the role they might play in expanding access to services.
Beyond the Summit: Our work in Minnesota
Our network spans the entire North Star State and individuals across the region use the Findhelp platform to find and connect to needed services and support.
- 6,770 listed programs serving Minnesota
- 950,000 users
- 2.4 million searches for resources
- 108,000 social needs assessments completed
As of October 2025, Findhelp partners with more than 16 customers throughout the state. They use our platform to connect their patients, members, students, constituents, and clients to local resources. Our data and analytic tools can identify gaps in services and provide actionable insights to inform strategy and public policy.
Building a better future for Minnesotans, together
The Minnesota Social Care Summit was a powerful reminder of what’s possible when healthcare systems, community organizations, and technology partners come together. Themes of privacy, accountability, and sustainability ran throughout the day, underscoring the shared responsibility to build a stronger, more connected social care network.
The conversation doesn’t end here; to learn more about how Findhelp can support your work in Minnesota, connect with our team.
