• Online platforms need to give the public a way to search for services and send self-referrals on their own time: evenings, weekends and holidays. With our Public Search and WebBuilder modules, clients and clinicians can access service information, additional resources, book intake appointments and complete service request forms at any time of day.

• Caredove is able to integrate with any digital tool or vendor adhering to the eHealth Ontario’s eReferral specification through our standards based HL7 FHIR API.
• Over 800 community agencies in Ontario use Caredove to streamline service navigation and referral intake processes. These agencies will be able to receive referrals via the future provincial health care navigation service. Further, any of these agencies can be included in a new OHT network. Once using Caredove, agencies never require additional training.
• A valuable and digitally mature OHT network will leverage existing successful technical infrastructures. Caredove excels at interoperability with other systems and has active integrations with CHRIS, Ocean, AlayaCare and more.

• Our WebBuilder (public facing eReferral portal) is supported by UserWay, the highest standard of accessibility tools available for websites. 
• Our clinician-facing portal is built consistent with the WCAG standard. 
• We support multi-language web projects and can translate any content into any language required for a local priority population.

• The Caredove Service Taxonomy includes over 80 categories of community services, ensuring that the complexity of each organization’s service offerings are clearly communicated. 
• The taxonomy includes other facets to further classify services for targeted populations and optimized search.
• Advanced filtering tools provide a robust service search by target population for underserved populations.

• The core of self-management is ensuring patient involvement in the decision making process. Our WebBuilder provides OHTs with a way to present clear information to clients to support their self-directed care journey.
• Features like Invite-to-Book puts decision making in the client’s hands, allowing them to schedule assessment appointments at convenient times, directly from an email invitation. This is a key element of self-management.
• Self-screening assessment tools within Caredove help prospective clients identify key health concerns and direct them to the most appropriate services.
• Enabling booking for individual intake appointments, as well group classes and workshops, supports a wide range of community health promotion programs.

• Community service agencies are unique in that they welcome referrals from the public, complementary organizations, primary care, hospital discharge teams and more. Caredove enables referrals to CBOs from the full scope of referral channels. 
• CBOs don’t want to check more than one place for their referrals. Doing so is a sure way to miss important service requests. With Caredove, CBOs capture all referrals in one spot, the Caredove Referral Inbox. Nothing is missed. 
• As new referral sources are added locally (e.g., Ocean referrals from primary care) CBOs rest assured that their Caredove listing is federated to these other locations, at no cost to them, ensuring no clients fall through the cracks.

Caredove supports community organizations across Canada. These are some of the common problems that Caredove addresses to improve access. 

• Confusing terminology. Organizations might offer similar services that go by different names. Without a common taxonomy of service categories that community providers can use to communicate what they do, collaboration becomes difficult, and access becomes confusing. 
• No service asset map. Spreadsheets of community resources are a nice effort, but don’t cut it. Local leaders struggle to know which CBO does what, where and how the public can access service. CBOs need to be able to update their own service information, on demand. No more time spent manually surveying.
• Referrer / Public confusion:  It is hard to create good referral forms, consent statements and clear eligibility requirements. Local clinicians and the public are left trying to decipher processes that can feel confusing and burdensome. A comprehensive online form repository adds clarity.
• Inconsistent data: In the case where organizations agree on what data to collect about clients, there is no central platform to enable this data collection. A referral management platform enables this.

• Initial assessments and intake appointments can be specified by the CBO as either in-person, by phone or virtual, giving the client choice in the access method. Individual appointment and service providers can opt to provide appointments by any or all of these modalities, depending on their target population and technical resources available.

• OHTs need an interoperable platform that makes it easy to refer clients between healthcare information systems. Caredove adheres to the Ontario eReferral standard. This ensures cross-sectoral relationships are scalable as OHTs add more community partners.

• The OHTs priority population and their unique needs will dictate which transitions in care are the focus for improvement.  
• Caredove is configurable to ensure community agencies receive streamlined referrals from any starting point, whether this is primary care, hospital, home and community care support services, or social media/websites.

• Caredove is an Ontario built, Ontario based company, whose referral platform addresses the localization nuances of the local health system. The infrastructure is ready to be leveraged. 
• Any of the 800 Ontario agencies, and their available services and appointment times, digitized referral forms, customized workflows, can be instantly added to an OHT network in Caredove. Onboarding costs are minimized when leveraging these existing, participating agencies, in Caredove.

• Autonomy: Each organization has a unique intake access process over which they want to maintain control. They are concerned that participating in a regional project means losing autonomy over which clients are eligible and how they triage new clients. 
• Website presence: Organizations’ websites are siloed environments. They have no easy way to promote their services on their website and in a central, coordinated access website.
• Pooling availability: If several organizations offer the same service, there is no simple way to see which organization has the next available appointment, or which has the shortest wait time.
• Client no shows: If an appointment has been booked, there are no email or text message reminders, leading to high volumes of no-shows.
• Client hassle: Clients are often met with access processes that fail to explain the next step in their journey, like who is going to help them, and when. 

Caredove supports any level of public access to mental health and addiction services depending on the local community needs. For example, mental health agencies can promote rapid access to services like brief counselling, income support programs and addiction services, while enabling cross-agency central intake processes for more intense or stepped-care services. They do this all while maintaining control over their own organizational intake processes. Learn more about features for Mental Health and Addictions networks.

Priority services for frail, isolated and vulnerable seniors can sometimes be difficult for caregivers to navigate. Seniors who live alone often slip through the cracks, isolated, without a support system to ensure their safety and monitor wellbeing. By leveraging Caredove’s service navigation tools, a region’s suite of related community services can be organized and made easily navigable by anyone supporting a senior who wishes to remain healthy and independent at home.

OHTs can leverage the over 600 Ontario community based organizations who specifically serve seniors, using Caredove referral inbox, today. Many of these organization share bookable intake appointments. These appointments enable clients and their caregivers to know who is going to help them and when, at every step of their care journey. Learn more about features for Community Support Services networks. 

Common issues faced by CBOs and local health networks:

• Website presence: Organizations’ websites are siloed environments. They have no easy way to promote their services on their website and in a central, coordinated access website.
• Marketing performance: Community based organizations often have a low marketing budget, leading to poor website load times, sparse SEO practices and a poor user experience overall. This makes promoting services to the public difficult.
  

Caredove has expertise in helping networks effectively promote available services in order to create awareness and gain trust among community members. Our WebBuilder is an easy-to-use website builder that can rapidly help a network promote a unified service delivery message, giving clients and investors confidence in the quality of care and will encourage client choice to drive the health care journey. Caredove considers all the pathways in which a client might navigate a website looking for services and ensures that each use case leads clients to the right page on your site. Enhancing a website with a secure Caredove self-assessment form, clients can be directed to appropriate services and complete service requests in a matter of minutes.

Our robust service listings directory is made available to any search engine (Google, Bing, etc.) ensuring that a network’s services are found by both clinicians and the public, further boosting Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and opportunities for community members to access available services.

Funding sources need to be provided with regular updates on network performance. The ability to monitor an overall network health by tracking referral volumes, intake activity and measurable outcomes will help identify areas for improvement and continued growth with additional partner organizations.

Caredove Metric and Reports include:

• WebBuilder website visit & activity (partnered with Google Analytics)
• Network-wide referral activity and volumes by CBO and by service provider
• Timeliness of care and referrability of individual services
• Net Promoter Score (typically above 70, platform wide)
• Referral statuses & outcomes (Booked, Admitted, Ineligible, Client No Show, etc.)
  

Community services can be a very safe and effective alternative to institutional care, hospital or LTC. For this reason, it is vital to connect every patient going home from hospital with at least one service in the community, and primary care follow up. We recommend a metric that tracks proportion of hospital discharged patients with a community referral, over time, and determining impacts on readmission and cost. Caredove reports can play a part of this.

• PHIPA and PIPEDA Compliant: Caredove protects all personal health information (PHI) according to Ontario regulatory standards.
• Security & Privacy Compliant: Caredove is trusted by 800+ organizations in Ontario and has met privacy, security and technical requirements for national organizations and major hospital systems. Caredove's servers are hosted on AWS in Montreal, so your personal health information never leaves Canada.
• Interoperable: Caredove is able to integrate with digital tools adhering to the eHealthOntario’s eReferral specification through our standards-based HL7 FHIR API.
• Trusted by other technology partners: Our established partnerships with provincial programs like Ontario eServices Program, and provincial IT assets such as CHRIS and other eReferral vendors, provide confidence to network leaders that Caredove is an interoperable solution for improve community service access. 
• Learn more about our privacy and security policies