Category: Policy

Privacy, Policy, and Personal Data

At Findhelp, we prioritize seeker privacy in all that we do. 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 for profit or shared at the whim of vendors.  

We can strike a balance between enhanced care coordination and a trauma-informed approach to care while protecting the dignity and privacy of people’s most sensitive moments. It is a myth to suggest care coordination can only happen with a blanket (all-in) consent, especially in social care.

An Informed Consent Approach to Privacy

Some models, such as all-in consent, require blanket approval for someone’s personal information to be shared across a broad and undefined network, removing transparency from the person in need and increasing data leakage that may cause unnecessary harm.  

Consider a person who shares with their doctor that they lost their job, cannot afford their insulin medication, and is facing some domestic partner challenges. Suppose the clinician makes some helpful referrals for free insulin and shelter support, but must collect a blanket consent from the person per the network vendor’s process. Suppose the vendor then shares (or sells) this information with risk stratification companies and allows hundreds of community organizations to search and access it, even without a direct referral or treatment relationship.  There most certainly is a better way, and technology can help.

A comparison of existing privacy models.

 

Findhelp’s Privacy Principles

In support of this consumer-directed model, we’ve adopted a transparent privacy policy that is publicly available on our website (company.findhelp.com/privacy/) and we adhere to the following principles:

  • Transparent, Informed Consent
    • Seekers know and consent to the full list of organizations that can see their information when they receive a referral.
    • Seekers have the right to revoke their consent at any time.
  • Permission-Based Access
    • Organizations limit access to seeker information to only the staff roles involved in seeker care or operations.
  • Seeker Access to Services with no quid pro quo
    • Seekers should still be able to receive referrals or services without being forced to agree to broad data sharing.

Digitization of Social Care Information

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated awareness of and access to new technology focused on health and wellness. Usage of new apps, websites, and wearable technology skyrocketed, with millions of people in the United States taking advantage of this newfound convenience and accessibility as they sought care in a number of different areas of their lives. 

Specific to telehealth and tele-therapy offerings, State legislatures acted quickly to ensure claims for new models of care delivery could be processed, and many niche startups in the telehealth space became mainstream. Industry leaders agree that healthcare required this innovation and policy attention to modernize how people receive care in their moments of need; however, there is often a dark side that accompanies progress. In this case, some companies are taking advantage of the people using these new services by inappropriately selling their personal data. 

 The Sale of Personal Data

Joanne Kim, a researcher with the Duke Sanford Public Policy School, contributed to a report on data brokers and the sale of sensitive mental health data in the United States. 

Highlights from the Report

  • 11 out of 37 contacted data brokers were willing and able to sell mental health data and health care records.
  • 10 data brokers advertised highly sensitive mental health data on Americans, including those with depression, insomnia, and anxiety. The data also included ethnicity, age, gender, ZIP Code, religion, children in the home, marital status, net worth, credit score, data of birth, and single parent status.
  • A specific data broker went as far as to offer names and postal addresses of individuals including those with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), personality disorders, and strokes, and included their race and ethnicity.
  • Pricing for this information varied: some offered licensing models of $75-$100k, while others charged only hundreds of dollars for 5,000 records.

For illustrative purposes, below is a subset of the data that is typically collected when helping a person address their social needs:

There are vendors operating in social care today that oppose policies that restrict the sale of this sensitive data. In fact, one vendor is actively promoting the fact that they are a “solution for consumer insights at scale, along with individual-level SDoH scoring and monitoring for every adult in the United States.”

Personal data is already being sold to help the risk stratification companies make a profit off of our most sensitive information. 

Consumers, policymakers, and the industries that serve health and wellness need to pay attention to the implication of personal health data being sold for a profit without consent. We must improve consumer protection across all sectors that serve the health of Americans; we cannot assume existing safeguards will prevent the violation of private information.  

This is an unacceptable gap in privacy and consent, and we must and can do better with policy and consumer transparency. Vendors shouldn’t be choosing the rules of privacy; consumers should be in control. 

Watch community organizations share their support for an informed consent approach to privacy.

 

Legislation and Advocacy We Support

 

We are pleased to see NH Senate Bill 423 recognize these gaps in privacy and act to protect New Hampshire constituents. We’re also pleased to support Assemblymember Weber in California, who is championing CA Assembly Bill 1011 to prevent the sale of private data. 

We support and will help champion these and future efforts to close the privacy gap in the social care space, to ensure that constituents have transparency, control, and continued dignity in their journey to a better quality of life for themselves and their families. 

Dive Deeper: Our Privacy Editorial

Privacy policy and legislation is a complex issue, with inconsistent or contradictory components state-to-state. You can take a deeper dive into the social care implications in our new editorial, “Consumer Privacy and Consent: Implications for Social Care and Social Drivers of Health in the United States” written by our Chief Operating Officer, Jaffer Traish. 

Meeting the Moment: Community Organizations Nationwide See Challenging Times Ahead

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 team at Findhelp knows that economic pressures can have a profound impact on the organizations that serve people seeking help, especially in the winter months. 

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.

Community Organizations Share Their Thoughts & Priorities

To better understand the current situation, we sponsored a survey to help policymakers, 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. 

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 increased?

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?

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.

Funding streams

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.

LayoffsBudgetCuts

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 goals for 2023

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.”

TechPlatform

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.

TurnaroundTime

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.

WhyDelay

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

PrimaryRole

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.”

SeniorityLevel

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.

Whattypesofcommunityserve

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.

TypesofSericesYouProvide

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.

Our Testimony on Privacy at the ONC HITAC Hearing

We’ve all needed help at some point in our lives, or will need help in the future. At findhelp, we’re committed to the principle that seekers should not be required to give up their privacy in order to receive help. Many people who seek resources are facing a crisis, suffering from abuse, or are newly unemployed. We believe that seekers should have control over their personal information and transparency about who sees it.

That’s why our platform is designed to prioritize user privacy and consent, as I shared in my testimony at The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) March 2022 Virtual Hearing.


This video features my testimony at the March 2022 ONC HITAC.

“People expect this deeply personal information, which is housed in closed-loop referral systems like ours, to only be visible to the organizations and people they choose, transparently.”

For some seekers, harm can come from the approaches of those in our field who use one-time consent models, rather than the per-referral consent model used by findhelp. One time-consent provides open access to seeker data for any organization in the network, which creates a greater risk for privacy infringement. The stakes for failing to protect sensitive data are high, which is why it’s our foremost priority.

“Imagine if you signed one consent to have your information put into a database so you could receive a food referral, but with that one action, more than 120 non-profit organizations in your community, many of which are not covered entities, can now see your financial, social, and medical information in its entirety.”

In my testimony (transcript here), I outlined our core principles for building social care equity into our platform and establishing government partnerships.

We’re dedicated to guarding consumer privacy by:

It’s our mission to connect all people in need and the programs that serve them– with dignity and ease. We’re committed to privacy, equity and interoperability, because we believe that the future of social care is interoperable and equitable, with seekers’ dignity at the center.

About the Author
Jaffer leads findhelp’s customer operations at findhelp, working directly with our sales, customer success, and community engagement teams. He has deep expertise in large-scale technology implementations and healthcare operations. Jaffer previously led enterprise implementations at Epic and has held executive leadership roles in healthcare technology consulting.

DePaul Community Health Centers Has a 70% Closed-Loop Referral Rate After Partnering with findhelp

In April 2018, with funding from the UnitedHealthcare Foundation, the DePaul Community Health Centers (DCHC) partnered with findhelp to begin its Care Fellowship initiative to address social determinants of health. Findhelp supported DCHC in creating a coordinated approach that proactively identifies and fulfills the needs of its patients. Through this partnership, DCHC’s closed-loop referral rate has grown to 70% in the three years since its staff first adopted its whitelabel version of findhelp’s search platform.

How findhelp Meets DePaul Community Health Centers’ Needs:

  • Findhelp’s assessment feature allows DCHC’s patients to easily connect with the social services they need;
  • Findhelp’s easy-to-use case management software keeps DCHC’s staff organized and informed of all patient activity;
  • Findhelp’s comprehensive database of social care programs has made it simple for DCHC’s staff to find relevant resources for their patients.

About DePaul Community Health Centers

DePaul Community Health Centers (DCHC), a member of Ascension, one of the leading non-profit and Catholic health systems in the U.S., is a non-profit healthcare organization offering primary and preventive health services to all members of the Greater New Orleans community, regardless of their ability to pay. DCHC has provided access to high-quality, compassionate health care since 1834.

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Challenges

DCHC launched a community health worker program in 2011 to address its patients’ SDoH needs. The health care agency needed a way to manage all of its patient information, but did not have a reliable case management system or know of any software that would be useful. DCHC’s community health navigators resorted to using Excel spreadsheets to keep its patient and client needs organized, but this was tedious to maintain, especially while trying to build trust with patients.

Bryan Refsland, a community health navigator with DePaul Community Health Centers, delivers a box of food to one of his clients in New Orleans, LA. Refsland works primarily with a population of formerly homeless individuals, helping them navigate the social services they need to maintain healthier lives.

DCHC’s navigators stretch the boundaries of patient care. Their one-on-one support ranges from scheduling appointments and helping enroll individuals in health insurance, to home visits and more. While DCHC’s navigators are able to address some of these needs in real time, others are more difficult. They turned to Google to find local resources for patients, and although Google was helpful, their searches were extensive, time-consuming, and often not productive. DCHC wanted an easy way to identify the needs of its clients and address their concerns while also staying organized internally so they could continue to complete their essential work.

How DePaul Community Health Centers Increased its Closed-Loop Referral Rate 

In 2018, DCHC found and connected with findhelp at a Medicaid Conference. When the health care agency initially decided to partner with findhelp, DCHC only wanted to use their custom platform to house patient information and did not consider the other case management tools findhelp offered. Once DCHC saw the value of findhelp’s comprehensive database of social services, however, its staff realized just how much their patients (and navigators) could benefit from the additional tools.

Shortly after the conference, DCHC launched its whitelabel version of findhelp’s search platform to support its Care Fellowship initiative. The goal was to connect patients and clients with organizations that address Social Determinants of Health, and effectively organize patient data, resources, and referrals. Utilizing findhelp at the beginning stages of the initiative proved to be instrumental for DCHC and helped grow closed-loop referral rates to 70%.

“We use findhelp as a case management tool. It helps us keep our patients and clients very organized to remember what resources we sent them,” says Zwena Moore-Randolph, Director of Business Development and Community Engagement, “So then we can see if one particular resource is in progress, if one is completed…it just helps keep us organized.”

DePaul Community Health Centers’ team of community health navigators has grown to include 12 navigators, some of whom are pictured here in their office in New Orleans, LA. The navigators spend a lot of time away from their desks, helping community members access the social services they need to improve their health.

The community health navigators at DCHC have created dedicated workflows to monitor referral outcomes after referring their patients to a local Community-Based Organization (CBO). Immediately after making a referral, the case manager updates the status to ‘pending’, to normalize the referral update process. Two days after the initial referral is sent, DCHC’s navigators follow-up with their patients to ensure they received help. If the patient has not yet received services, the navigators will reach out again two weeks later for another update. In addition to specific follow-up timeframes, the navigators have also built personal relationships with many staff members at CBOs and encourage them to update the statuses of DCHC’s patient referrals. These workflows and relationships help navigators keep track of who is getting help and whose needs are still unmet to effectively manage the Care Fellowship initiative on their findhelp platform.

Beyond referrals, DCHC’s staff partnered with findhelp to embed a social determinants of health assessment into its findhelp platform. Findhelp’s assessment feature allows DCHC to collect and validate patient social care needs to improve navigation of their whitelabeled platform and provide guidance for their navigators. After completing the assessment, patients automatically receive program recommendations based on their answers. They also have the option of getting their program recommendations sent to them via email, text, or print for ease of use. The assessment feature makes searching for social services easier for DCHC’s patients while also giving insight to DCHC’s navigators on how to better serve their clients.

Results of Working with findhelp

“What I find very helpful about findhelp…this technology is geared toward what the patient needs,” says Shelia Alexander, Community Health Navigator, “Findhelp gives you the resource, the contact information, the people who the agency serves, how to get in touch with the agency, and all of the information that the client needs to navigate that resource.”

The findhelp case management software offers DCHC’s community health navigators an easy way to find and save resources for their clients, assess their patients for social determinants of health, and stay organized and informed of all patient activity. Through its findhelp platform, strategic workflows, and the dedication of their community health navigators, DCHC closes the loop and gets individuals the help they need, sooner rather than later.

Want to learn more?

Read about how your organization can benefit from the findhelp network and check out our new video above on the DePaul Community Health Centers.

Stanford Immigration Policy Lab Collaborates with Aunt Bertha to Study Gaps in Services for Low-Income Immigrant Populations

The Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) at Stanford University recently completed a nationwide study examining the distribution of immigration legal services providers (ISPs). Their work analyzes where low-income immigrant populations live in relation to ISPs, which provide critical services for immigrants, like helping them with complicated legal processes related to living and working in the U.S. Understanding the great need to help this population, Stanford Immigration Policy Lab chose to partner with Aunt Bertha for this research and shared their comprehensive database of over 2,000 ISPs to be listed on Aunt Bertha’s  free online resource, findhelp.org.

How Aunt Bertha meets Stanford Immigration Policy Lab’s needs:

  • Aunt Bertha’s extensive database lists thousands of immigrant services, ranging from translation services to legal assistance and much more;
  • Aunt Bertha provides a quick and easy search for anyone to find help for free. It also provides tools for sharing programs with loved ones and connecting directly with programs; and
  • Aunt Bertha’s team reviews and maintains resources every six months to ensure people looking for help have the right information.

About the Immigration Policy Lab

With branches at Stanford University and ETH Zurich, Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab uses large datasets, creative research designs, and cutting-edge analytical tools to bring new evidence to bear on the urgent problems practitioners face. By guiding the people who set public policy, as well as those who directly serve low-income immigrant communities, their research inspires solutions that improve immigrants’ lives and strengthen the communities receiving them.

Aunt Bertha’s Impact on the Network of ISPs

The goal of IPL’s project was to create a comprehensive list of organizations in the U.S. that provide free or reduced-cost assistance with official immigration-related documents or forms (e.g., naturalization or DACA applications) and legal representation in immigration proceedings. This data would effectively reveal where low-income immigrant communities do not have reasonable access to critical services.

 In their working paper, IPL researchers write, 

“Immigrants often navigate legal challenges most citizens never encounter, such as renewing visas, petitioning for family reunification, pursuing naturalization, or defending themselves against deportation in immigration courts.”

The IPL study underscores the importance of these programs to this population and the importance of having a resource like findhelp.org to find these programs.   

The ISP network and the low-income immigrant population size across the U.S.

IPL reached out to Aunt Bertha about a research partnership after exploring findhelp.org and finding a number of ISPs in the Aunt Bertha program database. Understanding the great value of IPL’s research, Aunt Bertha shared data on existing immigrant service organizations in their database to help the IPL team map where low-income immigrant legal services were located in relation to need. The IPL team added these organizations to a larger list compiled from multiple sources in an attempt to create a complete listing of ISPs across the country. Aunt Bertha is now working to list every ISP included in the comprehensive database constructed by the Stanford team. Through this work, immigrants across the nation can use findhelp.org to connect to an ISP in their community.

Stanford’s Research Findings

Once equipped with the combined data from the Department of Justice, the Immigration Advocates Network, and Aunt Bertha, the Stanford research team was interested to find out whether there were communities that were overserved or underserved. Finding areas with gaps in the provision of services to low-income immigrants could help governments, funders, and service providers more effectively invest their resources in the communities that could most benefit from additional support. 

The Stanford research team found that most immigrants whose household income is below 150% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines live close to an ISP but that there are underserved areas in southern cities that have more recently become a popular destination for immigrants. Their analysis suggests that rearranging the distribution of ISPs across the nation would provide access to over one million more low-income immigrants nationwide. 

Moving Forward

Aunt Bertha’s unique database of hundreds of thousands of social service programs and nationwide search data provides an opportunity to obtain important insights regarding individuals seeking help. As part of our public benefit mission, we seek out opportunities to leverage our data with partners, like Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab, to enhance our collective understanding of how we best help people seeking services.  

Want to learn more?

Schedule a demo with one of our team members to see how Aunt Bertha can benefit your organization.

Standards Matter and We’re Pushing Them Forward

In every industry, the ability to communicate clearly and effectively is important. In the space that Aunt Bertha works in – enabling community organizations, businesses, and Seekers (those who are seeking assistance) to connect with each other – it’s especially critical. Information on what help is needed and who needs it must flow efficiently to enable timely assistance without errors and unnecessary extra steps.

That’s why our company cares so much about interoperability, a convoluted word for a very simple concept: making sure that data systems can speak with each other.

Imagine if mobile phones from different wireless companies such as AT&T or Verizon couldn’t send data or text messages to each other without additional third-party software. Or that you had to use different types of paid web browsers to view web pages from different industries because they were created with incompatible web-design languages.

When Internet of Things devices such as Wi-Fi light bulbs and smart doorbells started becoming available, a lack of interoperability delayed their popularity; for a while many products didn’t work together and made home installation a huge pain. More significantly, the healthcare industry suffered for years while expecting the U.S. government to drive collaboration and interoperability standards, making the adoption of electronic health records more costly and complicated for everyone.

As early as 2013 Aunt Bertha realized that our work requires an open taxonomy, or names and definitions, to make systems across different areas such as education, government, and healthcare communicate without problems.

Aunt Bertha founder and CEO Erine Gray says that such a thing that wasn’t proprietary didn’t exist at the time, requiring the company to take the lead on creating a sensible taxonomy for classifying social services. “We were looking for a taxonomy that was multi-faceted,” Gray said, “meaning a person has attributes of themselves (a disease, age, gender) and a service has attributes as well (food pantry, soup kitchen, help find housing). So we tag our programs with two categories: ‘Who it’s for’ and ‘what the service is.’ “

Gray says the company wanted to keep this taxonomy open and free to the public; Aunt Bertha published it with a Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

Aunt Bertha’s vice president of strategic partnerships, Jaffer Traish, says that this is in line with Aunt Bertha’s open platform and person-driven approach. With this classification approach, “The person owns the referral history and data, the person chooses who to share it with, the person can take charge of finding help as well,” Traish said.

This is counter to the approach taken by data-collecting companies that have a vested interest in keeping user data closed off to competitors and even their own users.

Jaffer Traish photo

Jaffer Traish, VP of partnerships at Aunt Bertha

Traish said that in the medical industry, “proprietary systems were innovative, though the companies that built them lacked any incentive to collaborate on external data exchange, creating large silos. Only recently are national identifiers for people, service price transparency, and consumer-driven standards beginning to address consumer demand.”

Aunt Bertha is not alone in its mission to promote interoperability in these systems. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is leading a national initiative to create standards for a technical framework of hardware, software, and information in healthcare, for instance.

Here are some other ways Aunt Bertha is promoting standards in the social-care space that it works in:

Portability of Social-Care Referrals

We are working on standards that support referral details being portable.  Because social referral details should be available to many helpers, including within and outside healthcare, we are working with electronic health record leaders such as Cerner and Epic to make social-care data system agnostic. Says Traish, “Only allowing social-care data to persist in a healthcare vendor platform would be harmful to communities and to seekers. We have their support for standards that work outside of healthcare; that is key.”

The ONC’s U.S. Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) and FHIR do not support social-care data fully, but the company feels they are good efforts to improve standards. We think the FHIR standard has enough traction and a vibrant governing body to move the space forward, and that’s why we believe it’s the right channel for housing these standards.

Future of Interoperability and Social Care

Aunt Bertha will continue to work to ensure that such data will be shareable across schools, hospitals, nonprofits, and other organizations, removing traditional barriers that depend on proprietary external systems.

“When people are struggling — whether it be a financial crisis or a family crisis, they need a safe, anonymous way of finding help,” said Traish. “And the first step is understanding what’s out there through our search. That’s why we don’t require a login to search and find services: to give people the security of anonymity. This is one of our core beliefs and I believe it differentiates us.

“Our interoperability strategy puts the individual as the owner of their own referral history and the decision to share is theirs,” he said.