Helpline Center
Report date
April 2022
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
Key components to our progress have been the existing relationships we had with community leaders in the two expansion communities of Brookings and Watertown. It is especially instrumental that our HCNC Partner Engagement Specialist, Tehra, is a community member herself. We have been able to bring the Helpline Center Network of Care (HCNC) to these communities with an established level of trust and alignment with their goal to develop community social care coordination. HCNC offers a technology tool to streamline connection between human service providers, but the relationships and trust must be established to move the project forward quickly.
Another specific aspect that has contributed to our progress on this project is our human-centered approach. We have built our HCNC partner engagement strategy with empathy and listening as core values. Our goal is to build authentic relationships with partners and embed into their existing community structures. By embedding into existing community structures, those relationships then created invitations to additional coalitions, collaborative meetings, and one-on-one discovery meetings with partners.
A third aspect that has been instrumental to our progress is a new approach to technology. Over the past 9 months, we transitioned to a new software platform that offers more configurable designs and integrations. Many organizations need a certain level of customization for the system to work for them. The new software allows us to better meet organization’s needs through integrations with email, data dashboards, and APIs with their existing platforms. The future of HCNC is integration and this new software will help us meet that future.
Key lessons learned
One key lesson our team learned early on is that some individuals are very uncomfortable with change. We learned this lesson from small failures such as awkward meetings and outright rejections. Our strategy has been to slow down and not push change on those individuals, but rather to work through outside relationships to encourage them and build momentum with those who do embrace change.
Internally, we have found that team communication will need continual attention. While there has not been any identifiable failure, leadership takes team members’ frustrations and feedback seriously, and work to address communication and transparency concerns immediately. We continue to improve our project management tools and processes to offer greater visibility into everyone's activities. Most importantly, as a team, we value vulnerability, trust each other's good intentions, and maintain a learning mindset.
Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving
Collaboration has been instrumental in guiding how we can best meet the needs of the community. Through work groups, discovery meetings, and participation in community planning initiatives, partners steer the vision for their communities. Because trusted community members own the process and collaborate on how the HCNC infrastructure will work best for them, they move forward more confidently and quickly.
Other key elements of Community Innovation
Because of our past experience building HCNC in Sioux Falls, we have been able to set more realistic expectations early on in the process with the two new communities. We are aware of the technological limitations, onboarding challenges, and the problems that HCNC cannot solve. Putting boundaries around the scope of the project helps us progress more quickly as it keeps us focused on delivering core functionality and prioritizing features that have the most impact.
Understanding the problem
The goal of HCNC has been to build a coordinated social service system through collaborative processes. Our partners know first-hand the struggle of community members to navigate complex systems to access the services they need to be healthy. They experience the inefficiencies of siloed data systems that result in duplicated processes and limited visibility into barriers and service gaps. In the quest to build a care coordination system, our main point of clarity is the absolute necessity of integration. Organizations in the social service system are so diverse in their technical maturity, funding sources, legal compliance, and in the services they provide that integration is the only way to bring everyone to the table. That realization is opening the door to innovations and connections we had not considered before.
If you could do it all over again...
Six years ago at the beginning of HCNC, we started with the mindset to encourage partners to use one software together. We have come a long way since then. We would go back and tell ourselves to be technology agnostic from the start. This would have been important to know as we may have developed a suite of technology tools to better meet partners’ and system needs.
One last thought
Early learning from the HCNC expansion is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution - every community is unique. With this opportunity to expand the network, we are learning that each community needs to understand HCNC in their own way, with their own words. Our goal is stay open about where our new communities will lead us in our HCNC journey. Our deliverable for this grant is a toolkit that will consolidate our learning and provide an actionable path to social care coordination with community ownership at the center.