Sonoma Connect | Sonoma Unidos Selects NinePatch™ to Power Sonoma County's Trauma Informed Network of Care

A coalition of partners and community members choose care coordination and referral services vendor to streamline and aggregate resources, health & social services and information sharing, including interoperability across referral networks, to better serve their community.

NinePatch Logo

Sonoma Connect | Sonoma Unidos (SC|SU) has announced its selection of NinePatch to power its newly formed Trauma Informed Network of Care (TINoC) in Sonoma County. 

"The Resource Connection Network (RCN), a SC|SU Action Team, is focused on community engagement first, working with Community-Based Organizations (CBO), county departments, school and community leaders, and community health centers to identify needs and priorities before selecting the technology solution that best meets those needs. Many initiatives are ultimately unsuccessful because they choose the technology first and try to fit the community into it after. We are proud of the strength and breadth of our community leadership that chose NinePatch and will ultimately create a stronger, more resilient and more equitable community," RCN Action Team Co-chair and Senior Director of Programs at Redwood Community Health Coalition (RCHC), Cynthia King, said.

"We could not be happier to be working with SC|SU to implement the NinePatch Whole Person Care Platform, to support achievement of their goal of addressing, preventing, and healing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and other complex health and social issues," NinePatch President and CEO, Leigh Sterling-Gooden, said. 

NinePatch will provide its Social and Health integration platform to the Sonoma County community to identify and address gaps in access to resources, to better coordinate services, and to communicate between organizations in the community's network. Referrals may be initiated by, or received from, any organization type (e.g., health/behavioral care provider, social service provider, school, other referral network, etc.); to facilitate ease of access to social services, health care, mental health care, substance misuse, and non-clinical wellness services. 

"This project seeks to achieve two distinct but overlapping aims: 1. To support high-quality comprehensive resources, closed loop referrals to support Sonoma County's ACEs Trauma Informed Network of Care partners, which includes health care providers, education & government leaders, and CBOs, and 2. To create a more integrated ecosystem for referral and information sharing by implementing interoperability functionality across technology systems," said Beth Paul, Community Leader and Senior Program Manager at RCHC. 

Sterling-Gooden adds, "We understand that there are existing referral platform efforts in various stages of development, implementation, and adoption. Advanced community leaders, like Sonoma Connect | Sonoma Unidos, wish to pierce these silos to create a more cohesive and operationally manageable ecosystem. That is why we built the NinePatch Referral Information Exchange, a standalone product, acting as a community clearinghouse to broker referral traffic between established referral platforms as a 'next generation' Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) solution. NinePatch is the first company to offer this needed functionality and we are thrilled to work with SC|SU to help us roll this out."

"CBOs cannot be expected to bear the burden of updating their resource directory information and receiving referrals in different places for multiple networks. These organizations do not have the operational capacity and may choose not to participate in any network. It is also understandable that different organizations (e.g., health systems) may prefer certain or pre-existing referral platforms, so our goal here is to enable these various platforms to coexist in an integrated community-wide ecosystem," said Adriana Arrizon, SC|SU Director. "Our decision to choose NinePatch was based on our community's clear understanding of our goals, and their unique abilities to accommodate and integrate with existing systems. It is very important to meet every organization where they are."

For more information about Sonoma Connect, visit sonomaconnect.org or to schedule an interview, please contact Mariana Raschke at mraschke@sonomaconnect.org. 

For more information about NinePatch, visit ninepatch.com or to schedule an interview, please contact Kendall Stanley at kendall@ninepatch.com or at 857-400-6226.

Source: NinePatch