Elaine Cray, Author at Findhelp

Findhelp was founded in 2010 with one employee and a mission: to make it easier for people to connect to the help they need, with dignity and ease. 13 years later our mission remains the same, but our business has grown to be the largest closed-loop referral system in the United States and includes more than 570 customers, over 100,000 in-network community-based program locations, and 40+ partnerships nationwide.

We’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished over the past decade, connecting millions of people to needed services, and we’re excited about what the future will bring. These are a few of the milestones and highlights we’ve achieved since 2010:

Partnering With Our Customers to Serve People in Need

Between 2015 and 2022, our customer network grew 1,800% across industries (healthcare, education, government, and more), serving every state in America. 28 million people have used our platform, representing more than 10% of the US adult population.

As our customer network has grown, so has our staff network. Our team members (affectionately called “Helplings”), work across the country to support our customers, community partners, and seekers.

Investing in Our Communities

While Austin has been and will always be our home, we’ve recently expanded our operations to include two additional hubs in Denver, CO and Madison, WI. Our Engineering, Product Management, and Customer Success leaders are all located in Madison and are excited to more fully integrate with the local community.

We’re investing in the cities our staff live in, embracing regional talent, and spending locally to build community. By focusing on these hubs, we can more meaningfully contribute to the cities that continue to give us so much, while creating collaboration centers for our teams. We are actively growing our teams in these locations as we modernize the social safety net to help those in need.

A Shared Sense of Responsibility

As a B Corp and a Public Benefit Corporation, our mission is ingrained in our business practices and structure. This means that our company generates social and public good as a business (not a nonprofit), and operates in a responsible and sustainable manner. Our shared dedication to helping others comes not only from an innate sense of responsibility and compassion, but from personal experience; many of our staff have been seekers (someone seeking help) themselves at one point or another, or supported friends or family going through tough times.

We know firsthand how hard it can be to find resources when already strapped for time and energy. So, even as we’re glad that more and more people are finding our platform and connecting to the resources they need, we are sensitive to the challenges that people are facing. We’re doing our part to influence legislation that protects seekers and their privacy, while reducing barriers to care and working to remove hurdles to getting help.

There’s been a growing need for help in the aftermath of a global pandemic and during an economic downturn. Our staff have a shared dedication to improving social determinants of health, but we also know that we must continue to grow and scale our business to reach even more people and connect them to resources.

To help address this growing need, we’re hiring across our teams, and we want you to share your talents with us! Please join us in this important and meaningful work of connecting people in need to the programs that serve them, with dignity and ease.

If you believe in our mission, please take a look at our open positions. If you see any that resonate with you, we strongly encourage you to apply! Join over 230 findhelp employees (“Helplings”) as we continue to scale our organization to reach more people in need across the country.

It’s a turbulent time for the U.S. economy, as layoffs permeate headlines and inflation chips away at Americans’ ability to purchase groceries, fill up the gas tank, and make rent each month. Our findhelp team knows that economic pressures can have a profound impact on the organizations that serve people seeking help, especially in the winter months.

That’s why we sponsored a survey to help policy makers, business leaders, donors, and members of the public better understand how nonprofits are reckoning with the challenges they’re facing today. The results of this survey demonstrate that demand for social care services has skyrocketed in the past year, and that the vast majority of community organizations are concerned about their ability to meet the demand for social care services in the current economic climate.

Since this time last year, findhelp searches have increased substantially as more healthcare organizations have begun to address patients’ SDOH care needs, and as food, rent, and gas prices increased, making basic resources more difficult to access. Our data shows a 113.34% increase in money searches, a 105.57% increase in housing searches, a 90.69% increase in transit searches, and a 88.4% increase in food searches since November 2021. As inflation exacerbates social care needs for underserved Americans, we’re dedicated to helping community organizations meet the moment.

We’re committed to modernizing America’s social safety net by helping connect all people in need and the programs that serve them — with dignity and ease. Our Community Engagement team plans to use this data to design new initiatives to support nonprofits in our network, and we hope that increased awareness about community organizations’ need will inspire donors to contribute to nonprofits and spur policy makers to act on their behalf.

The following is a summary of the questions our survey posed and responses we received from 323 community organization leaders between October 27 and November 7, 2022.

Survey Results

How much has demand for social care services increased among the people you serve within the past year?

An overwhelming majority of nonprofits (95%) said demand for their services has increased in the past year. 61% of respondents said demand has increased “substantially.” Less than 1% of respondents said they saw a decrease in demand, and only 4% said demand remained the same.

Do you expect an uptick in demand for help you provide as we get closer to the holiday season in November and December?

While nearly every organization experienced an increase in demand over the past year, a vast majority (82%) also expects demand to continue increasing through the 2022 holiday season.

How has amount fundraised changed since last year

How has the amount you’ve fundraised changed since this time last year?

Fundraising at nonprofits has not kept up with the increase in demand for services over the past year. In fact, two-thirds (66%) said that fundraising has either stayed the same or decreased as they deal with soaring demand.

How do you feel about what 2023 holds for your organization’s funding streams and ability to meet an increased demand for social care services in the current economic climate?

With fundraising levels that lag far behind the increasing demand for services, 76% of respondents said they are concerned about what the economic climate means for their organization in the coming year.

Do you anticipate there may be budget cuts/layoffs at your non-profit this year or next year that could impact your ability to help people in need?

Despite a forecast for challenging times ahead, nearly half (48%) of respondents said they do not expect to cut staff or budgets. Only 19% believed they would have to cut staff or budgets.

What are your major goals for 2023? Please check all that apply.

When asked what their goals are for the next year, the most frequent answer, indicated by 83%, was to “increase fundraising / development / donor recruitment.”

Would it be helpful if you had easy access to a technology platform that could eliminate red tape and get people in need immediate access to specific social care services?

Less than a third of nonprofits (29%) indicated that they currently use a technology platform to get people help. 25% said they use a platform already and find it to be helpful. 39% don’t use a technology platform yet, but think it would be helpful to have one.

What is the average response turnaround time when your organization receives a new application, inquiry, or referral for someone in need of your services?

Most nonprofits (73%) say that their average response time to people seeking help is less than two business days.

When turnaround times are longer, what is the main factor contributing to delays?

The biggest reason for longer turnaround times is staffing shortages, indicated by 52% of respondents.

Respondent Profile

What is your primary role at your organization?

Nearly half of all respondents were executives (46%) or board members (2%). 11% of respondents served in a community support role, 5% worked in marketing, 4% worked in fundraising, and 31% in “other.”

What is your level of seniority at your organization?

68% of all respondents were at senior-level or above (26% senior-level, 36% executive, and 6% board of directors). 24% of respondents were mid-level employees, and 8% were entry-level.

What type of communities does your organization currently serve?

The majority of respondents say their organizations serve city or urban communities (69%). Over half of all respondents serve suburban communities (59%) and rural communities (56%), showing a diversity of types of communities served among respondents.

What type of services does your organization provide? (select all that apply)

56% of respondent organizations provide support services/case management, 45% provide housing/rental/utility assistance, and 25% provide financial assistance. Other prominent categories included healthcare (23%), transportation (21%), employment training (19%), and “other” (43%).

Findhelp is the company modernizing America’s social safety net for anyone who needs help or helps others. With the largest network of community-based organizations and proprietary technology that intelligently matches people with the resources they need, findhelp is the fastest and most reliable way to get help with privacy and dignity. Findhelp is headquartered in Austin, Texas and has been enabling healthcare, government, education and other organizations to connect people with the social care resources that serve them since 2010.

To get in touch about the results of this survey, please contact us.

Wednesday’s national conference on hunger, nutrition and health is the Biden administration’s first step towards meeting its ambitious goal of ending food insecurity and diet-related diseases by 2030. It is the first such conference convened by the White House since 1969, and the inceptive summit led to the implementation of the food assistance programs that continue to underpin our nation’s response to hunger more than five decades later. President Biden has taken a similarly transformative approach to this conference, outlining a new national strategy that aligns the public and private sectors to end hunger, improve nutrition and physical activity, and reduce the disparities surrounding them.

When considering the convening of this conference, I am reminded of President Lyndon Johnson and “The Great Society.” The series of legislation, policy initiatives and programs developed in 1964 still constitute the largest social reform plan in modern history and have alleviated hardships for the country’s most vulnerable populations. Great Society programs advanced health equity, championed inclusion and improved affordability for Americans in need.

For this conference to have a lasting impact, it is critical that we use this generational opportunity to galvanize stakeholders. It’s also important that we envision what a new American safety net looks like, one that uses modern approaches and solutions to advance the conference’s agenda.

For the last 12 years, we’ve been committed to modernizing the American safety net and establishing the framework for the next generation of social reform by digitally indexing all available social service programs in the United States and simplifying the way people find and apply for them. The next era of the Great Society and the American safety net requires the private sector and public sector to work collaboratively, forging new partnerships and deepening existing relationships to address the challenges our nation faces today and will face moving forward. Together, we can solve the problems that prevent people from accessing social care resources the moment they need them with dignity and ease.

The Sync for Social Needs Coalition

We’re proud to have been recognized at the White House Conference on Hunger and Nutrition for our membership in the Sync for Social Needs coalition. The Sync for Social Needs coalition unites leading health technology companies and health plans, including HL7 International, Rush University System for Health, Tufts Medicine, Riverside Health System, SCAN Health Plan, Sanford Health System, BayCare, Geisinger, and the Veterans Health Administration, to standardize patient data sharing on the social determinants of health.

The coalition focuses on the types of patient data screened for, collected, and integrated to address social determinants of health concerns, such as food security and nutrition. Findhelp joins Epic, Oracle Health, Meditech, and other leading health IT companies in evaluating and piloting the integration of social needs screening tools in electronic medical record systems to further lower clinician burden and improve patient outcomes.

Want to learn more?

Read about the important work of the Sync for Social Needs coalition at https://blog.hl7.org/sync-for-social-needs.

At findhelp, we are proud of the work we do every day to connect people to the care they need, with dignity and ease. As the largest social care network with over 15 million users being connected to more than 566,000 programs nationwide, we know we provide an important service to communities – including in Tennessee.

Findhelp has been serving customers in Tennessee for six years, and we are proud of our relationships with organizations that span the healthcare continuum. Our network grows daily, connecting users with resources such as help paying for utilities, housing support, food pantries, health care, and transportation needs. We’re connecting individuals and families to more than 8,200 programs across the state and more than 73,000 social care referrals have been made in Tennessee via findhelp platforms,but there is more work to be done. We are constantly seeking out new opportunities to engage with healthcare providers, payors, administrators, community organizations, and nonprofits.

Our mission led us to seek a partnership with TennCare, the state of Tennessee’s Medicaid program. We hope to support a closed-loop referral system to ensure TennCare connects the state’s Medicaid population to programs that will meet needs that are directly related to but outside the traditional healthcare spectrum. Our unparalleled experience proves that connecting people to these services positively impacts health outcomes and benefits the whole person, and the entire community.

The initial round of the procurement process was met with some challenges. But thanks to the state for a commitment to transparency, we are happy to share that findhelp will be part of the rebidding process for this contract. We are committed to being a good faith partner with the state and the Division of TennCare. We recognize that the procurement process can be tedious for all parties involved. Yet, we know we can offer the best solution for TennCare members ensuring they receive the support they need from Community-Based Organizations with dignity and ease.

Want to learn more?

Read about how your organization can benefit from the findhelp network.

Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) are leaders in whole person care, taking a person-centered approach to address an individual’s medical, behavioral, and social care needs. While FQHCs traditionally offer wraparound services, their patients’ needs often extend beyond their four walls and they rely on local community organizations and nonprofit programs for social care services and support.

Findhelp supports 90+ FQHCs across the country to seamlessly integrate social care workflows into their existing care coordination processes. We have deep knowledge and experience with supporting their specific needs and we’re continuing to expand our customer base and community network across the country. In addition, we remain committed to our approach to privacy, with consent given at the point of each referral (vs. the all-in consent model used by other social care vendors).

We are proud to announce a new simple and low-cost pricing option for FQHCs: beginning July 1, 2022, a standard license starts at just $100/month for any FQHC! Learn more about this new pricing and how we can support your organization.

For more information about our new pricing and to learn more about how we support FQHCs, you can watch our recent webinar. Our partners from Lone Star Circle of Care in Austin, TX joined us to talk about how they use findhelp to support their communities.

Ready to get started today? Sign up here!

While serving as an Air Traffic Controller with the Marine Corps in Desert Storm, Aaron Harper never imagined the role he would later play in supporting military and veteran families in the US. After medically retiring from the Marines, Harper maintained his connections with North Carolina military and veteran organizations. Through various roles, he began to address a need for improved coordination of resource-sharing and promotion of veteran events and programs. This passion led to a career with Atrium Health, where Harper has expanded his reach throughout the Carolinas. It’s been 30 years since his first tour in Kuwait, and Harper, a fifth-generation Marine Corps war veteran, continues to serve through support of Atrium Health’s diverse impact strategies and initiatives. Central to these efforts is The Community Resource Hub.

In 2017, Atrium Health launched The Community Resource Hub, an online search and referral platform powered by Aunt Bertha. This free site is accessible to the general public and offers more than 1,000 resources for every county across the nation. Within Atrium Health’s coverage area — North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia — there are more than 800 programs specifically for active duty, National Guard, and veteran community members. Individuals have access to a comprehensive array of programs, such as mental health, employment, food, housing, legal and financial aid services, among others.

Support for Nonprofits

Nonprofits can use The Community Resource Hub to refer people they’re helping to other programs. The platform adheres to the highest privacy and security standards and regulations through HIPAA Compliance and HITRUST Certification. Each referral has an individual consent so that clients always know how and with whom their information is shared. Clients can apply personal filters — active duty, national guard, veterans, etc. — to tailor search results, self-refer to programs, and track the status of their own referrals.

Agencies can also access a free suite of intake tools and impact reports, communicate with one another on referrals, and access a host of features to streamline efforts and improve service coordination — all within the platform. The site also offers a variety of impact reports agencies can use to assess their work; these reports can be shared with funders and boards to demonstrate impact and reach. For example, veteran-serving organizations can see how frequently and in what capacity people are interacting with their listing, ZIP Codes with the most searches, and customized outcome data for their programs.

Monthly trainings and local support are always available to help each agency leverage their free suite of tools for maximum impact.

Visit our North Carolina page

Connecting the Carolinas

Harper is excited by the opportunities The Community Resource Hub has provided and its nationwide reach is an added benefit, particularly for military families on the move. As the former manager of Military and Veteran Affairs and current Human Resources strategic business partner, he is “honored to continue leading and advising Atrium Health’s military-veteran strategy along the way.” Harper also serves as elected president of VetCarolinas, where he helps organizations “connect with each other and be of best service for our military members, veterans, their families, and communities in general.”

Atrium Health has a long-standing commitment to both internal and external military and veteran communities. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded Atrium Health, formerly known as Carolinas HealthCare System, a Secretary of Defense Employer Support Freedom Award, the highest recognition given by the department to employers for their support of employees who serve in the National Guard or Reserves. They have since received multiple awards in recognition of their continued dedication.

A Commitment to Our Nation

Thanks to collaborations with customers like Atrium Health, Aunt Bertha has reached 1,000,000 searches in North Carolina, providing access to nearly 10,000 programs across the state since 2015. As the nation’s largest social care network, we are proud to partner with more than 350 customers and 75,000 social service providers throughout the US. We are committed to ensuring that our veterans, who have served with honor, can connect with the programs that serve them, with dignity and ease.

Military/Veterans — Three generations of Marines (From left to right: Sgt Rick LeFebvre, Cpl Frances Cole Prescott, Sgt Cecil Cole and Sgt Aaron Harper), Photo Credit: Jack Cole.

Connect with Us

For more information about our network, trainings, and free tools for Community-Based Organizations (CBOs), visit our page for Nonprofits or contact [email protected] to connect with local support in any state across the country!

By the way, who’s Aunt Bertha?

Aunt Bertha is the leading referral platform for social services in America, serving the biggest cities and smallest towns. We connect people seeking help and the verified social care providers that serve them, with dignity and ease. We make it easy for people to find social services in their communities, for nonprofits to coordinate their efforts, and for organizations to integrate social care into the work they already do. We serve millions of users and our platform is used in a wide range of industries including education, government, housing, and healthcare.

KLAS Research, the industry standard for impartial healthcare IT research, has issued its first Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) Referral Networks Report showing Aunt Bertha as the clear leader in the space. As the industry pioneer with the greatest share of the market, Aunt Bertha leads in value and integrity and rates highly in satisfaction. Aunt Bertha—which has the largest closed-loop referral network across all 50 States—had the largest number of respondents and most complete data set, generating the most accurate and statistically significant results in the group of evaluated organizations.

KLAS’ rankings are based on interviews with thousands of healthcare professionals about the IT products and services their organizations use. Vendors are scored on several pillars including value.

In this year’s report, Aunt Bertha received an “A” grade for value and an overall score of 91.7 indicating high satisfaction. The satisfaction ratings are especially notable for a network operating at the size and duration of the Austin-based social benefit corporation, having 100+ more healthcare customers than its closest competitor, and more customers than all its competitors combined, according to the report.

Aunt Bertha received the highest scores for quality of phone/web support, ease of use, and customers receiving their “money’s worth.”
Aunt Bertha is the only vendor validated as bringing in referrals from publicly accessible websites.
Aunt Bertha customers highlighted the responsiveness of the vendor’s executives and the vendor’s willingness to customize.
Aunt Bertha received an A grade in the subcategories of culture, loyalty, relationships and value.

The first-ever SDOH report from KLAS recognizes referral networks that seek to close health care gaps by connecting care providers with community resources in their area. As a public benefit corporation and pioneer in the social care network industry, Aunt Bertha has differentiated itself in an increasingly crowded space through a commitment to privacy, transparency, fair pricing and a whole person approach to care. The company has vastly more users than other competitors, which gives context to the rankings.

Aunt Bertha currently serves over 200 health care organizations and insurers across the country, as well as United Way 2-1-1s, and other large nonprofits — resulting in the largest closed loop referral network in the United States. Aunt Bertha also runs findhelp.org, a free version of its platform that individuals across the country can use anonymously. In 2020, Aunt Bertha served its 5 millionth customer, and the site has become a go-to resource during the challenging times brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

On August 8th, 2006 I started my first day of work at MAXIMUS, Inc., a leading consulting firm focused on “Helping Government Serve the People.” I was there to support the firm’s efforts to deliver on Texas Health and Human Services Executive Commissioner Albert Hawkins’ vision to “make it easier for Texans to apply for services by modernizing technology and letting citizens choose how they want to submit an application — whether that’s in person or by phone, mail, fax or Internet.” I was 100% on board and excited to get started. Two years earlier, in 2004, I graduated from the LBJ School of Public Affairs and was ready to go “fix” the government. “Now’s my chance,” I thought to myself.

Privatization

Accenture was the prime contractor in this privatization effort and MAXIMUS was helping support their efforts. At the time, Accenture tended to hire the well-to-do children of well-to-do parents who were among the top of most of America’s elite universities. As a new employee on that project, I was struck by how professional — yet, how young — they all looked. I was also struck by how many of them there were. Turns out, an $840 million dollar contract will bring you lots of consultants at extremely high billing rates. They wrote about their award in a press release they published on June 30, 2005.

southfield — Image 1: The Texas Access Alliance was based in South Austin, and from this headquarters, managed the State of Texas’ Eligibility Services privatization efforts.

Not everybody looked at this contract with excitement. In the first few weeks of starting my new job I looked out the window and saw protesters from a local employees’ union marching around my building. They had concerns about how this contract was being managed. Their concerns were valid. I would later learn the contract was not being managed very well at all.

Things Fell Apart

For the first few months, I had a chance to work closely with the Integrated Eligibility team. Integrated Eligibility was a vision in which anyone in need in Texas could fill out one application for government benefits — without having to go and apply through several different departments. It was meant to make it easier for people to navigate the bureaucratic application process during their times of need. There were lots of meetings, big thinkers, and whiteboard sessions. I made it a point to stay quiet in meetings for an entire month so that I could learn as much as possible (and I didn’t want to sound like an idiot). In the first six months I also led a few projects, including a study of all of the eligibility rules involved in deciding which Texans gets Medicaid, SNAP, TANF or CHIP when they apply.

Then — seemingly out of nowhere — on March 13, 2007 I learned from a news article that the project I was working on was cancelled. I had no insider knowledge of this and was just as surprised as everybody sitting around me. Later that afternoon I was called into a conference room with a dozen or so of my colleagues and was told about the transition. The company I worked for would now be responsible for helping the State of Texas manage that transition, taking over the operations of the project. It was a meeting that I’ll never forget, and turned out to be a pivotal moment in my career.

Rebuilding

Remember those well-dressed young consultants? They were leaving and doing so quickly. Our company had to backfill a few of the key roles so I had an opportunity to recruit a team, including some of my colleagues from the LBJ School. Almost immediately, I was promoted to the Director of Reporting & Analysis for Eligibility Services (a new name for Integrated Eligibility) — where I managed a team of business analysts, programmers, and project managers. We got to work. The years from 2007 through 2010 feel like a blur — but I knew we were making a real difference. Our team was a utility team of sorts — a catch-all for interesting problems that others didn’t know what to do with.

One of the problems we needed to solve was to forecast how many calls we might receive on any given month, day or even the time of day so that our company could appropriately staff the State Eligibility Call Center. When you call 211 in Texas you are presented with an option to connect to the State Eligibility Call Center. From there, an agent will help someone apply for services by phone. Operationalizing a growing call center isn’t always easy and it involves a deep understanding of: historical data, human nature (when people choose to make phone calls), and a little economic forecasting. For example, is there a relationship between the unemployment rate and the number of applications for public benefits? We had a hunch, but we would soon find out that — unequivocally, yes — there is a relationship.

Even Mother Nature seemed to have concerns about privatization. In early September of 2008 Hurricane Ike came along. With its devastation brought more and more people applying for government services — many for the first time. The State was inundated with new applicants for benefits and we could barely keep up with the demand to process those applications. Through a lot of overtime and some good public policy decisions like emergency SNAP payments — we helped a lot of people going through a rough time. I was proud of my team, I was proud of my company and I was proud to be a Texan. However, what we would face just a few short weeks after Hurricane Ike would surpass just about everything we would have expected.

The 2008 Financial Crisis

In September 2008, the global financial crisis happened. The stock market crashed. We went into recession. And month by month after this happened, we saw a dramatic increase in the number of applications for public benefits, including the SNAP program. Our company was responsible for taking these calls from people in one of their most vulnerable moments of their lives.

Most new applicants had no experience navigating public benefits, and many were in desperate situations. In my role, I often would dive into projects and analyze problems and fix things. I remember one night I had a chance to listen to calls that were recorded. I could hear the desperation in people’s voices and I could hear the call center agents being as empathetic as they could be. But that empathy wasn’t enough. In the image below, you will see a dramatic spike in the number of people enrolled in the SNAP program in Texas in December of 2008. This graph doesn’t fully tell the story of what was going on behind the scenes.

A Perfect Storm of Greed, Incompetence & Hard Work

Most of us heard the story of what caused the financial crisis. If you don’t remember, renting The Big Short will get you up to speed and it will get you angry. I just watched the trailer and I encourage you to do the same.

In 2008 when the American economy fell apart, a team of 2,500 of us were doing everything we possibly could to keep up with the demand for public benefits as a result. Thousands and thousands of people were newly dependent on the government for food, health insurance and money.

During those years I worked closely with the Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) group responsible for building the software that state employees used to process people’s benefits. Many were good people doing their best, but I also had the opportunity to see the underbelly of how government technology contracts are awarded, staffed and managed. And it made me sick to my stomach.

The Enterprise Architecture (EA) Team

The Enterprise Architecture team at HHSC was responsible for all of the technology infrastructure for one of the largest bureaucracies in the United States. Governments depend on their technology. Because technology can be complicated by eligibility rules and governance structures, good oversight of these contractors requires a deep understanding of the details. If that understanding isn’t there, sometimes people just take the contractors at their word when it comes to cost estimates and oversight.

Large consulting firms were hired to deliver technology. They would bill the State rates of sometimes hundreds of dollars per hour. Once these firms obtained these contracts, they would hire subcontractors. And sometimes, those subcontractors would hire subcontractors. And sometimes those subcontractors would hire more subcontractors — this is not an exaggeration. There were hundreds of these programmers on various projects around the agency. If the contracted rate for a software developer on a contract was $225 per hour, let’s say, that means the State was paying $468,000 per year for that software developer. If you asked one of those software developers who were actually doing the work how much they made, it was a fraction of the amount. In some cases, almost three quarters of what the state was paying was going to “pigs at the trough,” the many layers of firms taking their cut.

Many people knew what was going on. What struck me about these, and other issues, was that everyone just seemed to accept that that’s just the way things were. I believe that business could be a great innovator when partnered with government agencies — but weren’t we citizens first?

Judgment Day

While I worked on that project I spent a lot of time being angry. I was angry about how much money was spent on technology. I was angry at how much money was being wasted. I’m not against privatization. If done well, it really is the best of both worlds. But if governments don’t pay attention, businesses will take advantage. One hopes this corruption gets exposed, but for a while it didn’t seem like that would ever happen.

In 2012, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission entered into a sole source agreement with an organization called 21CT. This project blew up in a controversy that exposed much of the problems with the technology contracting process at HHSC. It took a while — too long for my liking — but eventually, sunlight exposed the corruption.

History repeats itself, it seems. Nine years later, governments are now showing interest in social care networks like ours. Some governments are putting out competitive RFPs to find a vendor. And some are not, choosing to take a sole source approach costing millions of dollars more than an equivalently sized state. At least one vendor in our space is telling governments that they are the only vendor that can do this work. They are not telling the truth. KLAS, a leading analyst, recently assessed five different solutions that do this work, and that report can be found here. When there are five vendors of a service, that’s more than one “source.”

During normal circumstances, governments go through a competitive Request for Proposal (RFP) process when they buy software and services. There are rules and best practices to prevent bad behavior by contractors and state officials. But we are not living in normal circumstances. With the influx of CARES Act funds — meant for emergency services like food, rent assistance and other vital goods meant to help — many technology vendors see dollar signs. Now that the trough is full again, here come the pigs.

Our Pricing Philosophy

I’ve learned a lot over the last 10 years about how companies are founded, funded and sustained. And sometimes I find myself with the same sickening feelings that I had 15 years ago. There’s a revolving door between the government and the venture capital industry. One day you help set policy for a $1 trillion dollar agency, the next day you’re a venture capitalist? Yeah, OK.

Newsflash, the system is broken and shortcuts are taken. Many of us are trying to answer the question of what we can do to change that. Lately I’ve been feeling more optimistic. We’ve witnessed the democratization of software with the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Companies began to offer software at a reasonable cost with unlimited users — without crossing ethical boundaries about creepy uses of data (like universal consents). There is something to be said for quietly striving toward what’s right and what the world should look like. In the spirit of that, here’s what we commit to.

Transparent Pricing

When we buy something, we’re used to seeing price tags. Whether it’s a t-shirt from the GAP, or subscribing to Netflix. We have become accustomed to easily finding out how much something costs. Some software companies do not publish their pricing — why not? Well, either they want you to sign up for a demo or they aren’t being consistent with their pricing.

We made a commitment to publish our pricing on our website in 2017. I believe price transparency is an important principle and it’s one of the reasons why more health plans, hospital systems, and other customers have chosen our product over our competitors.

Reasonable Pricing

We’ll always provide findhelp.org, the largest social care network in the United States, for free to everybody. For organizations that hire large groups of social workers, we offer advanced features they can subscribe to. We offer three subscription models for organizations — depending on what they need. Our customers can upgrade or downgrade at any time.

Commitment to Good Government

Despite the procurement problems I’ve seen in government lately, and despite the bad actors that are out there, I can’t help but feel optimistic about the future of IT in government. Things are moving in the right direction — just a bit more slowly than in other sectors. Organizations like Code for America and the US Digital Service have moved the needle on what’s possible and we continue to be inspired by their advocacy. To our current and future government customers, I can promise we’ll be fiercely protective of the trust you put in us. We’ll be straight with you and we’ll be good stewards of your investment.

I’ll close with a quick story.

In the fall of 2018, I had a discussion with someone in the IT Department of a major health system. I told him about some of these principles and shared why we believe in these things. I told him I didn’t like the way Healthcare IT worked — and that things should be different. And I told him by pricing the way we did, we were trying to change the status quo. He gave me a polite “good luck with that” and we parted ways. He may have thought I was a bit naive. Probably, but I don’t really care.

After all, we’re citizens first.

Want to learn more?

Talk to one of our team members about our philosophy on pricing.

Like many of you, we’re working to adjust and adapt as COVID-19 concerns grow. We applaud the work organizations are doing to connect clients with the services they are seeking during this uncertain time. To support those efforts, we’d like to share a few free tools to lend a helping hand to those organizations and their staff.

If you belong to an organization that is connecting people with vital services, please see the tools below, and let us know how else we can help.

Search on Aunt Bertha for resources.
AuntBertha.com is free to use, with free and reduced cost programs listed in every state and Puerto Rico. The one-minute video will show you how to search and connect to organizations in your area — for yourself or for those in need in your community. We encourage you to share this video as a resource with your networks.

Claim your program to update your program hours, manage availability, and screen connections quickly.
We know that COVID-19 might create an unexpected increase in need for your organization’s services. Once you have claimed and are part of our growing network, you have the ability to let community members know about changes should your program need to alter availability or service hours.

Once you’ve claimed:

Additionally, should you need to include eligibility or acceptance criteria for your services and get a clearer sense of which individuals you can best serve, you can do so by adding a screener to your program.

Add temporary or new services.
If your organization runs programs that help people and aren’t already listed in the network, be sure to add them. If you’re running programs that specifically address the impacts of COVID-19, you can add them here.

Check out our other tools.
We offer multiple intake management tools to help you manage requests. You can also help more people get connected by adding a simple search box to your website.

Let us know how else we can help you.
We’re trying to learn about how agencies and nonprofits are working to adapt, respond, and still deliver vital services to the community. To help us understand the impact, we created a brief survey and would appreciate your insight if you can spare a few minutes.

As the need for social care navigation rises within the U.S., an increasing number of vendors are treating this as an opportunity to make money instead of creating meaningful change. (You may even be familiar with the phrase “Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) Gold Rush,” which some have used to describe this trend.)

At Aunt Bertha, we’re solving for social determinants using sustainable models that serve all in the long term. To help organizations cut through the noise, we’ve put together a few questions organizations should ask when evaluating vendors, with our own take on responses.

Is your network a closed loop system?

Absolutely! Three entities can close the loop on a referral: the person (or family member) in need, the organization that makes the referral, and the CBO that receives the referral. Once the loop is closed by one party, all three parties can see this information. CBOs can also document referral outcomes, schedules, screenings, and other items pertaining to a referral—all of which are available to view in the Aunt Bertha Platform.

Organizations can monitor referral outcomes from the seeker profile.

In the Aunt Bertha Platform, organizations can update referral statuses via email or the dashboard, where teams can monitor incoming updates.

In the video below, we describe the three different types of networks we support: coordinated, participating and open networks. Although we happily support our customers who prefer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and other arrangements for close partnerships, we also support networks with greater flexibility for nonprofits who want to participate and use the platform for their intake mechanism. These nonprofits do not need contracts to participate in the closed loop network. This approach supports scaling participation in the network.

We support coordinated networks with strong referral relationships, participating nonprofits who will respond to referrals and members who prefer other mechanisms of intake. Watch this short video to see the difference between these networks.

Should a vendor guarantee a specific service or outcome?

We believe nonprofits should join networks because they see mutual value, not simply because an insurance company or a state government is tying funding to the activity. Vendors that guarantee services from nonprofits have to use contracts, closed networks, and a limited scope of programs to meet those expectations, which are often short-lived. The result of this promise is a very small network.

Our experience shows that nonprofits are responsive with replies and services for the long term when there is trust in the community. That’s why we work in partnership with our customers to build this trust and it’s an investment we make together over time. Vendors can play an important role in bringing organizations together to create trust, share tools, and align incentives. However, we don’t believe this community trust should be outsourced to a vendor or a vendor contract, as this creates an unsustainable arrangement for communities often focused only on industry goals (ex: should a nonprofit do one thing for a healthcare provider, and then something entirely different for an education provider?).

More and more nonprofits join sustainable networks as incentives align. We encourage our customers to sit at the same table as nonprofits with their sleeves rolled up, working hand in hand with nonprofits. Vendors like ourselves have a place, but it’s as additional collaborators sharing best practices and encouraging this participation.

Do referrals include individuals’ consent and understanding of the referral?

Yes. We take great care to ensure that the Seeker’s consent is captured. Any person or organization making a referral must confirm that they have received the person’s consent before submitting the referral. The level of consent required will vary by user based on their organization’s policies. A referral cannot be sent without confirmation of consent, and the confirmation is stored with the referral record.

We’re a HITRUST certified organization and we follow all security best practices.

Can the referral sender communicate with an individual and their care team after sending a referral?

Yes. After a referral is sent, the organization staff, the receiving CBO, and the helper supporting the seeker will have the ability to view the seeker’s contact information to reach out if needed. If the sender is a part of the community care team, they can share notes to communicate with other team members.

Is there reporting on specific replies, outcomes, and impact of services?

Yes. Aunt Bertha’s analytics tools provide specific reports on responses, status of responses, specific outcomes tracking reports, as well as specific services delivered. Nonprofits can use outcomes tracking when documenting specific outcomes and services. Helpers (staff) conduct goal tracking, notes, and assessment that offer insights into what factors lead to success in helping people in need. Our customers bring outcomes data into their own reporting processes for further ROI study and marriage within clinical and claims data.

What is the community engagement process? Who is the team dedicated to integrating the platform into each organization’s workflow?

We have an in-house and onsite shared services community engagement team working with more than 240 customers across the United States. We know that building and maintaining successful relationships with nonprofits in the local community requires trust.

At Aunt Bertha, our dedicated Community Engagement team focuses on building long term relationships between helpers and nonprofits in the community. We foster deep connections by bringing customers to the table to share, teach, train and invest in community alignment. Our approach is a long-term process through which customers partner alongside with us — not outsource to us. We run network events, lunch and learns, workshops, webinars, and many more events each month across the country. We also teach and train our customer community liaisons to similarly build relationships in the community for the long term. Our team listens and engages nonprofits in our network building to deepen engagement and participation. With this approach, we have successfully proven the ability to grow a sustainable social care network that thrives beyond the onboarding period. In 2019 alone, we ran 42 workshops across 29 cities, and had more than 1,000 organizations in attendance.

Can you help measure impact, time savings, and more with comprehensive reporting?

Yes. We’re proud to say that our platform has provided incredible efficiencies in referral and follow-up processes for all of our customers. Whether they’re moving from manual, paper-based directories or are addressing a heavy volume of utilizers to local providers, the time savings of our systematic workflows are clear and immediate and can be measured.

Through our reporting suites, customers have access to invaluable insight into Seeker, nonprofit, and staff activity, plus outcomes tracking to better inform ROI and supplement clinical and claims data.

Heat mapping illustrates search and referral activity on our platform at the national, state, county, city and postal code level.

Reporting and dashboarding tools help identify needs in the community and available resources to inform goals.

What does your community network look like?

Our social care network is the largest and most widely used to date, and the only social services platform whose network includes programs for every ZIP Code in the United States. We touch every county throughout the U.S. with no preference between large cities, small towns, and rural areas. You can find a minimum of 875 programs in any county, with some counties at over 4,000 programs listed.

By joining this network made up of an installed user base already sending and receiving high volumes of referrals, clients are able to help their communities immediately and skip the lengthy onboarding of other “pay us and we’ll build it” network models.

Our customers can focus the network with their in-network nonprofits (coordinated) where they always expect responses and participation, though they also have access to the long tail of services, thus making it the strongest network for staff and seekers at the same time.

We love sharing the size and scope of our network so much, we’ve made this information readily available to the public via our interactive dashboard, located here:

Aunt Bertha’s Social Care Network: An interactive map demonstrating the strength of our social care network in every county
in the United States.

Do you have strong EHR integrations?

Yes. We have a long history of working directly with providers of EHR systems, including athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, and Cerner so that the record of care follows a patient from inside clinical walls out into the community. We have both SMART on FHIR integrations that are closed-loop, as well as Native integrations in the EHR entirely.

We’ve included links to some of our more popular integrations below:

Cerner: https://code.cerner.com/apps/auntbertha
Epic (Native): https://apporchard.epic.com/Gallery?id=1199
Epic (Launch): https://apporchard.epic.com/Gallery?id=161
Innovacer: https://innovaccer.com/solutions/sdoh/
Altruista: https://www.altruistahealth.com/resources/social-determinants-of-health

In Summary

We welcome prospects to chat with us anytime. If you’d like a demo, or want to speak to someone on our team, just reach out and we’re happy to walk you through any and all of this functionality.

As you move forward with the important work of addressing social care within your organization, we want to make sure you have as much information as possible. There’s a lot of hype in this space, and sometimes it’s hard to know what’s real. During your due diligence process, it’s important to ask the questions we’ve shared above, as well as others such as:

How many users does the vendor you’re evaluating have in your service area?
How many participating CBOs does the vendor you’re evaluating have in your service area?
How many electronic connections has the vendor you’re evaluating facilitated in your service area?

Pay attention to whether the vendors you’re evaluating are willing to answer these questions. Or, do they ask for a non-disclosure agreement (NDA)? If it’s a vendor that spends a lot of time talking about outcomes, are they willing to share those outcomes with clear, complete data that illustrates their claims?

Hopefully, as you’ve interacted with our website over the years and spoken to our team, you’ve found us to be open and transparent about what we can accomplish together. You might also find that we’re far more open about answering the questions above than others in the space.

We’re not slick, and we take pride in being straightforward. We understand that we’re tackling hard problems and it takes true partnership with our clients. We’re an open book, we’re committed to the long run, and we’re here to help. Call us anytime.

Interested in learning more?

Reach out to us here.