The Sacramento Health Connect (SHC), will securely integrate and exchange medical, behavioral health, housing, social care, incarceration, and crisis response data to improve care coordination between health and social service providers.This will facilitate streamlined care delivery, enhance access to critical programs for Medi-Cal and justice-involved populations, and support program planning to improve individual outcomes and reduce health inequities.
The SHC is a platform to securely integrate and share individual’s medical, behavioral health, housing, social care, incarceration and crisis response data to improve care coordination between health and social service providers.
SHC Purpose and Goals
Why the Sacramento Health Connect?
We are creating an opportunity to deliver a more coordinated approach to care and services to support optimal individual outcomes and reduce health inequities. The purpose of the SHC architecture is to establish a secure data sharing infrastructure and framework that exchanges data across sectors and silos to enable the delivery of data-driven, responsive whole-person care.
Purpose and Goals of the SHC
The overall goals of the Sacramento Health Connect align with those of California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal (CalAIM), which is a broad transformation of Medi-Cal aimed at creating a more coordinated, person-centered, and equitable health system that works for all Californians. Similarly, the SHC strives to support and promote increased coordination and effective, personalized care across all providers through systems improvements.
SHC will remove data silos, which will make seeking and receiving care more accessible and equitable. This, in turn, can reduce the rates at which individuals experience hospitalization and re-incarceration.
SHC will promote whole-person health. Individuals will no longer have to separate aspects of health and wellness that are in fact deeply connected.
Individuals will not need to recount complex medical and social histories over and over again or take the same screenings multiple times when visiting a provider. This will save time and improve the experience of seeking care.
SHC will connect providers to the data they need to more effectively meet their patients' holistic needs.
SHC will reduce the amount of time providers spend on paperwork by creating efficiencies that make time spent more productive.
SHC will build a data sharing network that enables providers to not only send closed-loop referrals, but also to avoid sending patients to services that do not work well for them.
We are excited to partner with Innovaccer to develop adaptable and sustainable unifying architecture. Innovaccer was selected following a competitive bidding process from October 2023 through April 2024.
While it is expected that the SHC will be an ongoing project with no expected end date, the core data architecture, technical infrastructure and data exchange components will be built over an initial three year period, beginning in 2025. The following is a high-level overview of the first three phases of implementation and the estimated timeline for each.
The SHC is a model that connects the social factors that influence health with a patient’s physical and behavioral health care. Regardless of where a patient seeks care, they should be able to access or be referred to services that meet their physical, behavioral, and social health needs. Some benefits of this model include, but are not limited to:
Data systems in scope for the SHC architecture include, but are not limited to:
Systems that capture social determinants of health (SDoH) screenings and referrals to social care services
Systems that provide information on state and federally managed programs
Systems and databases that capture resource data, including community resource inventories and provider directories
No! All SHC work is complementary and not duplicative or competitive with exisiting provider systems. The SHC is intended to be a network of networks, more like a connective hub that links together provider and social care systems that are not currently connected.
