The inability to share information across multiple health care and community service organizations thwarts efforts to improve the overall wellbeing of communities. 

• Medical information is fragmented across multiple providers with limited bi-directional information exchange 
• Some individual health information (e.g., behavioral health) is confidential and restricted to other providers
• Social determinants of health information (e.g., social services, public health, community- and individual-level) when collected is often fragmented across organizations. 

These complex pathways of care and separation between the medical enterprise and social service organizations often create information silos that are poorly connected.

Despite shared goals of improving the health and wellbeing of community members, isolating information exchange barriers continue to exist.  

Engage communities using a socio-technical design process to maximize collaboration to eliminate these information silos and improve overall population health and wellbeing.  

In collaboration with the City of Longmont and other partners, we propose to co-develop, implement, and evaluate a shared, locally governed data infrastructure that links healthcare and service organizations to better inform provision of services to meet individual needs, eliminate redundancies across groups, and improve access to community resources and services.

We are a community-based participatory research team from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and Colorado State University. Teamed up with sociotechnical design experts in Newcastle University to pilot this work in Longmont, CO. Our goal is to help communities advance and thrive using innovative and collaborative thinking.

Don Nease, MD

Director of Community Engagement

Colorado Clinical & Translational Sciences Institute

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

donald.nease@ucdenver.edu

Bruno Sobral, PhD

Professor

Colorado State University

Bruno.Sobral@colostate.edu

Kaylee Rivera, MPH, CHES

Project Manager

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

kaylee.rivera@cuanschutz.edu

Dixon Dick

President, CEO

Archethought Inc.

Founder CoSolve, Longmont

dixon@archethought.com