Why a Community Collaboration Will Change Lives: Created By the Community, For the Community

Serving as western CO’s health information exchange for more than 15 years meant that we were able to witness firsthand the personal stories from local organizations and their incredible community caregivers.

Their experiences encouraged us to find a way to use our information exchange expertise to find a solution. Two years and hundreds of community meetings and feedback later, we released the first version of the Community Resource Network (CRN).

Our Mesa County community asked for an information exchange platform that could do several things. In Sarah’s Case:

Show a big picture, whole-person view of Sarah’s health.

What are her immediate medical, social, and behavioral needs?

How do those needs intersect?

Show Sarah’s care history—

What care and services did she receive and plan to receive?

How can we follow-up?

Include a comprehensive local resource directory

to make fast, closed-loop, electronic referrals.

Let’s finally retire the fax machine and start tracking referrals for Sarah electronically across the community.

Enable simple communication between caregivers.

One place to send emails, texts, or simple alerts to the team to make sure we all know where Sarah is at on her journey.

The CRN project is a community-driven solution—not just a piece of technology. We work with you to find out your specific community needs and tailor a short- and long-term plan around your goals, starting with organizing and empowering community members to lead implementation of the technology.

So far we have organized and began mobilizing Mesa, Delta, and Pitkin Counties with a path forward to make our cities and counties healthier.

It might seem like a lot of work for a refrigerator, but we know that organizing communities and implementing solutions to assist with their goals is the future of health and social care—and it’s the way to a brighter future for struggling communities.