ONC LEAP: Aligning Housing and Health Care Project

Outreach worker with badge crouching at tent and making notes in tablet while talking to refugee

Problem

AllianceChicago developed a care plan to enhance care coordination for individuals experiencing homelessness.

In 2022, AllianceChicago received funding from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) Leading Edge Acceleration Projects (LEAP) in health information technology (IT) to address fast emerging challenges that inhibit the development, use, and advancement of interoperable health IT.

Specifically, the Aligning Housing and Healthcare (AHAH) project proposed to work with a Chicago-based community health center and a homeless service organization to:

Understand and characterize the elements of a comprehensive care plan bridging the domains of need and services across both organizations
Co-design and pilot test a standards-based, open source, interoperable care plan accessible to both organizations and the patients
Conduct a rigorous evaluation of the pilot approach to understand its impact on the organizations and patients and considerations for scaling across additional service domains and institutions

Solution

NORC led a comprehensive evaluation of the Aligning Housing and Healthcare (AHAH) project.

AllianceChicago subcontracted with NORC to evaluate the AHAH project, aiming to provide insights into the sociotechnical factors involved in implementing a shared electronic care plan application. To assess both technical feasibility and user experience, NORC conducted a comprehensive evaluation from May 2023 through September 2024. The evaluation focused on three key areas:

Assessing the technical feasibility of designing and developing a shared electronic care plan application implemented at a community health center and a community-based housing organization
Describing care team members’ experiences regarding its design, implementation, use, and utility of the electronic care plan
Identifying the challenges and facilitators of implementing the electronic care plan as well as lessons learned for scaling the eCare Plan to other settings and use cases

This approach showcased NORC’s strengths in innovative evaluation methods for health IT solutions and responsiveness to client needs, ultimately providing actionable insights for scaling the referral app to other settings and enhancing service delivery for providers and patients.

Result

Findings from NORC’s evaluation will guide the future scaling of health IT solutions across a variety of service domains and institutions.

The evaluation summarized the technical feasibility of designing and implementing a shared electronic care plan between a health care and social service organization, demonstrating their potential for widespread adoption across similar organizations. By distilling insights from various stakeholders involved in the effort, key challenges and facilitators for design and implementation that were identified provide lessons learned and suggestions for overcoming common barriers and capitalizing on facilitators in similar initiatives. This foundational work lays the groundwork for broader adoption of interoperable health IT solutions across unique settings, ultimately enhancing service delivery and health outcomes on a larger scale.