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SDOH Referral Networks 2021
A First Look at Connecting Providers with Community Resources
Author
Bradley Hunter
Author
Paul Warburton
Adoption of technology to help provider organizations manage SDOH referrals is still early, but interest is growing as organizations seek to take on more value-based reimbursement risk. This report provides a first look at customer satisfaction with various SDOH referral network solutions and examines the parts of the SDOH referral process in which these solutions are being used. All measured vendors in this early market have overall scores above 90 (out of 100), indicating high overall satisfaction. Shifts in satisfaction are possible as the market matures and the number of KLAS ratings increases.
INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
Despite providers’ best care efforts, many factors outside of their control impact a patient’s health—such as the patient’s housing status, emotional support system, access to food/transportation, and other social determinants of health (SDOH). SDOH referral networks seek to close these gaps by connecting providers with community resources in their area. Once providers identify a need, they can use an SDOH network to refer patients to appropriate resources, with the ultimate goal of creating stronger, healthier communities. While there are many settings in which SDOH needs might be identified and addressed (schools, churches, etc.), this report focuses specifically on the technology healthcare providers use to find and close these gaps.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INSIGHTS
Adoption of technology to help provider organizations manage SDOH referrals is still early, but interest is growing as organizations seek to take on more value-based reimbursement risk. This report provides a first look at customer satisfaction with various SDOH referral network solutions and examines the parts of the SDOH referral process in which these solutions are being used. All measured vendors in this early market have overall scores above 90 (out of 100), indicating high overall satisfaction. Shifts in satisfaction are possible as the market matures and the number of KLAS ratings increases.
Cross-Industry Experience of Aunt Bertha and Unite Us Drives Adoption and Outcomes
Aunt Bertha and Unite Us have seen the fastest growth in healthcare, partly due to their existing presence in community and government entities. Market share leader Aunt Bertha is noted for their strong partnerships, which have helped drive new wins in the market, and customers report achieving good results. They feel some functionality gaps hinder additional outcomes—e.g., they would like it to be easier to close the loop on referrals and see which gaps have been addressed. Unite Us customers also highlight their deep partnerships. They say the vendor’s effective training and proactive approach to addressing customer needs lead to strong outcomes and customers achieving their SDOH goals. Healthcare-specific Signify Health and NowPow came later to the market and have fewer customers to date. Signify Health customers highlight the vendor’s ability to drive outcomes, in part through effective support that quickly provides fixes and enhancements to improve the user experience. NowPow customers mention that some functionality gaps hinder outcomes.
Product development and functionality are often key satisfaction metrics in new and emerging markets. In the SDOH network market specifically, integration is mission critical as provider organizations look to connect patients with community resources.
Delivery of New Technology: Aunt Bertha Updates Are Timely & Tailored to Customer Requests
Aunt Bertha customers highlight the responsiveness of the vendor’s executives and the vendor’s willingness to customize and continue to develop their technology. Signify Health customers value the clear communication they receive regarding which change requests are being granted and the status of these requests as they move through the process. This transparency results in customers feeling that Signify Health keeps their promises. NowPow customers would like their vendor to create a stronger feedback loop regarding the product’s development road map. Unite Us customers feel their vendor could do a better job of including requested customizations in their product updates.
Product Functionality: NowPow Customers Seek Better Analytics
NowPow customers report the need for better analytics to identify care gaps and track intervention outcomes; they would also like more transparency and greater flexibility in getting details back from community resources. Signify Health customers say the functionality that allows private communication between owned and non-owned resources supports HIPAA compliance; they would like Signify Health to create a module that supports care plans/coordination workflows. Aunt Bertha customers value the ability to personalize workflows; they would like more data transparency, including better access to data from community resources. Unite Us customers highlight their data capture and analytics capabilities as well as the product’s streamlined workflows.
Integration: Early Signify Health Customers Report Strong EMR Interfacing
Signify Health customers say the vendor is good at tackling the technical challenges (e.g., complex data mapping) that come with interfacing closely with customers’ EMRs, resulting in a more complete longitudinal record. Some Aunt Bertha and NowPow customers report integration with a variety of data sources in addition to the EMR and say this helps facilitate coordination with community resources. While these customers prove it can be done, most others are still in the process of rolling this integration out. Aunt Bertha customers would like the rollout to be more streamlined. Unite Us customers would like to see more willingness and speed from their vendor to integrate with EMRs and other care management technology.
Aunt Bertha, NowPow, Signify Health, and Unite Us Adopted for a Large Majority of SDOH Capabilities
Customers of Aunt Bertha, NowPow, Signify Health, and Unite Us validate adoption of their solutions for a wide variety of SDOH capabilities. To show the breadth of capabilities each vendor offers, the data in the chart below was gathered from vendors’ most advanced customers. (Conversely, the customer satisfaction data reported on in the preceding pages comes from a random sample of each vendor’s broader customer base.)
Vendor Bottom Lines
For more information about the technology and functionality provided by SDOH referral network solutions, please see the SDOH network framework in the full report.
Aunt Bertha: Early entrant to the SDOH network market and the market share leader. Wide variety of customers, including healthcare, government, and community-based organizations. Initially focused on providing consumer directory and therefore is the only vendor validated as bringing in referrals from public-facing websites. Still developing some care-coordination pieces, such as the ability to assign patients to care teams.
NowPow: Serves a variety of customers, including large health systems, large ambulatory organizations, and community-based organizations. Focuses on SDOH assessment, offering proprietary identification solutions. Was not validated for ingesting outcomes data from other EMRs or data platforms (e.g., population health management or care management tools).
Signify Health: Previously TAVHealth before Signify acquisition in 2019. Customer base includes community-based organizations as well as a few large healthcare organizations. Connects providers with community resources that Signify has vetted; focused on analytics. Not validated for providing portal to allow patients to self-track and report.
Unite Us: Has one of the largest customer bases, including large healthcare organizations and some community-based organizations. Focuses on bringing together providers and community partners and provides strong training and onboarding for community resources during and after implementation. KLAS did not validate any customers leveraging them for patient tracking and assessment of their own progress (care coordination).
Other Validated Vendors:
Activate Care: Newer entrant to SDOH referral network market. Acts as patient information hub between different parties and facilitates access to information about patient needs. Interviewed customers more limited in their adoption of resource directory capabilities (e.g., functionality that allows community resources and providers to make network updates).
Healthify: Customer base includes payers, large healthcare organizations, and community-based organizations. Focuses on helping providers by facilitating access to community resources Healthify partners with. No interviewed customers report adoption of care plan technology or facilitating patient access to the care plan technology.
About This Report
Each year, KLAS interviews thousands of healthcare professionals about the IT products and services their organizations use. These interviews are conducted using a standard quantitative evaluation, and the scores and commentary collected are shared in reports like this one and online in real time so that other providers and IT professionals can benefit from their peers’ experiences. To enable readers to more quickly understand high-level differences in vendor performance and give better context as to how each product compares to other offerings in the market, KLAS has organized the questions from the standard evaluation into six customer experience pillars—culture, loyalty, operations, product, relationship, and value.
To supplement the data gathered with this standard evaluation, KLAS also creates various supplemental evaluations that target a subset of KLAS’ overall sampling and delve deeper into the most pressing questions facing healthcare technology today.
The data in this report comes from both evaluation types and was collected over the last 12 months; the number of unique responding organizations for each vendor is given in the chart below.
What Does “Limited Data” Mean?
Some products are used in only a small number of facilities, some vendors are resistant to providing client lists, and some respondents choose not to answer particular questions. Thus a vendor’s sample size may vary from question to question and may not reach KLAS’ required threshold of 15 unique respondents. When a vendor’s sample size for a particular question is less than 15, the score for that question is marked with an asterisk (*) or otherwise designated as “limited data.” If the sample size is less than 6, no score is shown. Note that when a vendor has a low number of reporting sites, the possibility exists for KLAS scores to change significantly as new surveys are collected.
Overall scores are measured on a 100-point scale and represent the weighted average of several yes/no questions as well as other questions scored on a 9-point scale.
Writer
Elizabeth Pew
Designer
Jess Wallace-Simpson
Project Manager
Natalie Jamison
This material is copyrighted. Any organization gaining unauthorized access to this report will be liable to compensate KLAS for the full retail price. Please see the KLAS DATA USE POLICY for information regarding use of this report. © 2024 KLAS Research, LLC. All Rights Reserved. NOTE: Performance scores may change significantly when including newly interviewed provider organizations, especially when added to a smaller sample size like in emerging markets with a small number of live clients. The findings presented are not meant to be conclusive data for an entire client base.