Sonoma Connect Selects NinePatch®

NinePatch® to power Trauma Informed Network of Care (TINoC) in Sonoma County

KNOXVILLE, TN and SANTA ROSA, CA, USA May 25, 2022 — Sonoma Connect selects  NinePatch®

A coalition of partners and community members select NinePatch Whole Person Care to streamline, aggregate resources, and share health and social services and information across referral networks.

“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 equitable community,” said RCN Action Team Co-chair and Senior Director of Programs at Redwood Community Health Coalition (RCHC).

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

NinePatch will provide its social determinants of health platform to the Sonoma County community to identify and address access gaps, improve service coordination, and communicate between in-network organizations. Bi-directional referrals may be transmitted between all organizations to facilitate access to social services, health care, mental health care, substance misuse, and non-clinical wellness services.

According to Beth Paul, Community Leader, and Senior Program Manager at RCHC, “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

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 solution. NinePatch is the first company to offer this needed functionality, and we are thrilled that Sonoma Connect selects NinePatch® to roll this out.”

According to Adriana Arrizon, SC|SU Director, “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 may prefer certain or pre-existing referral platforms. So the goal is to enable platforms to coexist in an integrated community-wide ecosystem. Sonoma Connects selection of 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 contact Mariana Raschke at mraschke@sonomaconnect.org

For more information about Whole Person Care, RIE, or Community Convener Services, contact NinePatch sales at 833-9PATCH1 x 710.

Note: Redwood Community Health Coalition (RCHC) has since changed its name to Aliados Health.