< + > Inside Australia’s Wide-Open Acute Care EHR and Aged Care Markets

I was in Sydney, Australia for the HIC2026 (Health Innovation Community 2026) conference, and it was fantastic. The event felt familiar to conferences on my home turf in Canada – lots of discussion about government initiatives, funding obstacles, workforce issues, and geographic challenges.

Beyond the great venue and warm hospitality, the event highlighted a market going through rapid digital transformation. Three big trends stood out: a massive push in elder care, major workforce and interoperability initiatives, and an EHR market that remains wide open.

Key Takeaways from HIC 2026

• Australia’s aged care sector is undergoing rapid regulatory reform, motivating providers to modernize systems and improve data exchange across acute and primary care.
• Digital front door initiatives and clinical informatics credentials are taking center stage to reduce emergency department strain and build workforce capability.
• The Australian EHR market is a rare global greenfield, with many hospitals replacing paper or fragmented legacy setups, attracting major international software vendors.

Aged Care Reform Demands Practical Vendor Alignment

I caught up with Tom Symondson, CEO of Ageing Australia, to talk about the latest developments in the country’s efforts to address the silver tsunami. According to Symondson, a new Aged Care Act is pushing a thousand providers across the continent to raise their digital sophistication. Right now, data flow between aged care, hospitals, and primary care is almost non-existent.

Symondson offered strong advice for technology companies looking to enter this space. He warned vendors to stop tagging products with “AI” unless the functionality is real: “Stop doing that [tagging products with AI] unless it’s genuinely AI-enabled…the vendors that come to me and say ‘I’m not having success’ are the ones that have not been able to transform their marketing speak into a description of how that product will help the provider comply with their regulatory requirements.”

Driving Connected Care Through Workforces and Digital Front Doors

Interoperability and workforce readiness were main talking points in the hallways. Anja Nikolic, CEO of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (AIDH), explained how they are launching a rigorous clinical informatics fellowship. The goal is to build up an educated, verified digital health workforce that has the mastery needed to connect clinicians, patients, and systems together.

The digital front door and access challenges were also a hot topic at HIC2026. I spoke with Dr. Amith Shetty from the New South Wales Ministry of Health. His team created a single digital front door app that lets patients self-triage using built-in nurse algorithms. By steering non-urgent cases to virtual care consults and local clinics, they are already seeing real diversion away from crowded emergency rooms.

A Greenfield EHR Opportunity Down Under

Walking the exhibit floor revealed a surprising reality about Australian acute care. Unlike North America or Europe, many Australian hospitals still operate without a centralized electronic health record system. Many sites still rely on paper or a loose collection of disparate software applications (aka point solutions).

This gap makes Australia one of the few global markets where EHR vendors do not have to fight off a dominant incumbent. Companies like Dedalus, MEDITECH, Oracle, and Epic were out in full force to capture this growing demand. Vendors that offer clear orchestration, secure communication tools like Celo Health and CloudWave, and cloud migration paths will find a hungry audience here.

The Bottom Line

Australia is entering a critical phase of growth in digital health. Providers are looking for fast, proven implementations, especially when it comes to AI, elder care, patient access, and interoperability. For health IT vendors, success down under means having a clear line from marketing promise to smooth implementation to meaningful results.

Questions Healthcare IT Leaders are Asking

Why is the Australian hospital market attractive to EHR vendors right now? Unlike saturated markets in North America, many Australian hospitals still lack a centralized electronic health record system. This gives software vendors a rare greenfield opportunity to implement enterprise solutions without needing to dislodge entrenched incumbent platforms.

How can health IT vendors successfully sell into the Australian aged care market? Vendors must align their sales messages directly with provider regulatory, data reporting, and financial constraints. Aged care providers need practical software that streamlines compliance under the new Aged Care Act and connects cleanly with acute and primary care systems.

Video Features (in order of appearance):

• Tom Symondson from Ageing Australia
• Anja Nikolic from AIDH
• Amith Shetty from New South Wales Ministry of Health
• George Margelis from Ageing Australia
• Didier Moutia from InterSystems
• Jacob Wheeler from CloudWave
• George Patapis from Dedalus
• David Swanson from Commure
• Matthew McBride from MEDITECH
• Steve Vlok from Celo
• Ramanan Moorthy from Celo
• Paul Pettit from Commure
• Michael Anderson from Solventum

< + > What’s Next? A View of the Future of NEMT (Non-Emergency Medical Transportation)

The following is a guest article by Elizabeth Jepsen, Chief of Staff at Kinetik

A Q&A recap of Kinetik’s industry panel on the future of non-emergency medical transportation

When transportation breaks down, so does care. That was the throughline of a recent Kinetik webinar panel discussion on The State of NEMT 2026: The Future of Healthcare Transportation. Moderated by Mohammad Hossain of Kinetik, the panel featured the CEO of United Healthcare New Mexico; Dr. Ainsley MacLean, a practicing neuroradiologist and former Chief AI officer at Kaiser Permanente who now leads carcompany.ai; and Tonya Copeland, Chief Growth Officer at Liberty Health and board chair of NEMTAC. Kinetik Co-Founder and CEO, Sufian Chowdhury, joined the conversation as well.

Their shared message: non-emergency medical transportation isn’t a logistics problem. It’s a care problem. The webinar’s panel discussion highlighted what needs to change in NEMT.

NEMT as Care Coordination, Not Logistics

When did you stop viewing NEMT as “just a ride”?

The shift happened early for the CEO of United Healthcare New Mexico. He saw firsthand that transportation was often the single biggest barrier standing between a rural Medicaid member and the care they needed. In New Mexico, it isn’t out of the ordinary for patients to drive 100 to 150 miles round trip to reach an appointment, a real challenge for anyone working an hourly job.

The takeaway: the appointment starts the moment a member walks out their front door, not when they arrive at the clinic. That means transportation needs the same coordination as the visit itself. And reliability is what determines whether members trust the benefit enough to use it at all.

What Clinical Experience Teaches About Technology’s Limits

What did practicing medicine teach you about where technology helps, and where it doesn’t?

Dr. Ainsley MacLean has spent her career on both sides of the equation, treating patients as a Harvard-trained radiologist and building AI strategy as Kaiser Permanente’s first chief AI officer. That dual view shapes how she thinks about value. True value, she said, means tying every service back to outcomes: longer, healthier lives. Transportation, she argued, is a spoke the industry has largely overlooked on that wheel.

That thinking led carcompany.ai to rename its drivers as “navigators,” treating their experience as being just as important as the patient’s, the payer’s, or the physician’s. As care shifts from hospitals to outpatient settings and homes, MacLean sees navigators as more than a ride. They’re a touchpoint that can catch a missed mammogram or an overdue cancer screening before it becomes something bigger.

What Providers See That Plans Don’t

Where have you seen a disconnect within NEMT?

Tonya Copeland’s perspective comes from having run an NEMT program herself. Early in her career, leading a multi-state agency serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and the elderly, she couldn’t find a single vendor willing to transport the population she served. Eventually, her agency became an NEMT vendor out of necessity.

More than a decade later, Copeland still sees the same gap. The label “non-emergency,” she said, undersells how urgent and important these trips are. Missing a ride to a dialysis appointment or a primary care visit isn’t a scheduling inconvenience. For the member, it can feel like an emergency. Transportation, she said, is foundational. Without it, care simply doesn’t happen.

The Systemic Fix

After a decade building Kinetik, what’s your view of what needs to change in NEMT?

Kinetik CEO Sufian Chowdhury pointed to a structural problem: NEMT was never designed as part of the healthcare continuum, which is why so much value leaks out of the system. He pointed to a wave of rural hospital closures on the horizon, more than 400 expected in the coming years, that will roughly double the distance many patients travel to reach care.

Chowdhury’s math is stark. He estimates the true cost of missed and delayed care from transportation gaps at more than $150 billion, dwarfing the roughly $8 billion NEMT market itself. For decades, he said, payers have treated NEMT as a transaction rather than weighing the far larger cost of getting it wrong.

Building a Network That Lasts

What does it take to keep transportation providers viable?

For the  CEO of United Healthcare New Mexico, the focus has been on fair pricing. Transportation providers need to be paid enough to stay viable rather than paying them the lowest per-mile rate, which hurts the network in the long run. Health plans and brokers need to treat transportation providers as partners.

Copeland sees reason for optimism in new rural health transformation grants tied to HR1, several of which name transportation explicitly. Tennessee’s grant, for example, focuses specifically on transportation technology, a sign that states are starting to treat the problem as solvable.

Trust, Funding, and the Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Spotlight

The conversation turned to funding, and here the panelists largely agreed: the system is working against itself. Chowdhury pointed out the irony of health plans paying liquidated damages when a ride falls through, dollars that could instead fund surge pricing to make sure the ride actually happens. Rising gas prices compound the problem on both ends, keeping drivers from taking trips and keeping patients from following through on appointments. Chowdhury described patients in Pikeville, Kentucky skipping medical visits because they couldn’t afford the drive.

The stakes go beyond inconvenience. Chowdhury said that members who miss a methadone or dialysis appointment are more likely to end up in the emergency department in the near future. Copeland’s answer is professionalization: treating NEMT drivers and the systems that support them as core healthcare infrastructure, not an administrative afterthought.

Closing: Rapid-Fire

To close, Hossain posed one question to each panelist: with 5.8 million Americans missing or delaying care due to transportation barriers, what’s one thing you can do to move that number in the next five years?

The CEO of United Healthcare New Mexico recommends to over-communicate as members need to hear, repeatedly, that the ride will be reliable and safe before they’ll trust it enough to use it. Copeland is staying focused on professionalizing the industry at the federal level through her work with NEMTAC and CMS. MacLean wants to redefine quality itself, measuring NEMT by verified health outcomes rather than verified miles driven. And Chowdhury’s answer was blunt: fix the funding structure now, before chronic underfunding turns into a genuine crisis.

Four different seats at the table. One shared conclusion: transportation is care.

Watch the webinar to get the full conversation.

About Elizabeth Jepsen

Elizabeth Jepsen is Chief of Staff at Kinetik, where she partners closely with the CEO and executive team to drive strategic alignment, operational rigor, and cross-functional execution. Working at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and public policy, she supports initiatives that strengthen Medicaid transportation infrastructure, improve accountability, and expand access to care for vulnerable populations. She leads executive planning, board and investor communications, and enterprise-wide initiatives—bringing clarity, ownership, and momentum to complex, high-growth environments. Prior to her current role, Elizabeth built her career in marketing and communications across nonprofit organizations, higher education, and hospital systems. She led brand strategy, executive communications, content development, and integrated marketing campaigns designed to elevate mission-driven institutions and deepen stakeholder engagement. Across every role, she is driven by a commitment to helping organizations communicate with clarity, operate with excellence, and create measurable impact.

Kinetik is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.

< + > This Week’s Health IT Jobs – August 12, 2026

It can be very overwhelming scrolling through job board after job board in search of a position that fits your wants and needs. Let us take that stress away by finding a mix of great health IT jobs for you! We hope you enjoy this look at some of the health IT jobs we saw healthcare organizations trying to fill this week.

Here’s a quick look at some of the health IT jobs we found:

• Technical Systems Lead, CA Bridge Connect – Public Health Institute
• Information Security Analyst – VaxCare
• Officer-Chief Nursing Information – Baptist Memorial Health Care
• Privacy Officer – Summa Health
• System Director IT Security – Stormont Vail Health
• Community Liaison Worker Level II – NYC Health + Hospitals
• Associate Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer – VHC Health
• Privacy Specialist – SSM Health
• IT Security & Compliance Lead (Healthcare) – Premium Health Center
• Chief Information Officer – PDI Healthcare
• Senior Privacy Analyst – AdventHealth
• Cybersecurity Engineer – Montefiore Health System
• Community Health Worker – OhioHealth
• Lead IT Security Analyst – HIPAA, HITRUST, FISMA – NYU Langone Health
• Principle Cybersecurity Analyst (Remote) – UnitedHealth Group
• Virtual Chief Information Officer (vCIO) – Healthcare – Meriplex
• Social Determinants of Health Coordinator – AbsoluteCare
• Specialist, Health Plan Provider Engagement (Remote in MI) – Molina Healthcare
• Cyber Security Analyst – Medical Devices – Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
• Privacy Analyst III – CareSource

If none of these jobs fit your needs, be sure to check out our previous health IT job listings.

Do you have an open health IT position that you are looking to fill? Contact us here with a link to the open position and we’ll be happy to feature it in next week’s article at no charge!

*Note: These jobs are listed by Healthcare IT Today as a free service to the community. Healthcare IT Today does not endorse or vouch for the company or the job posting. We encourage anyone applying to these jobs to do their own due diligence.

< + > Governance is the New Differentiator in EHR-Adjacent AI

The following is a guest article by Angela Adams, CEO at Inflo Health

Healthcare has spent the past several years adding AI into clinical workflows across imaging, documentation, and decision support. It’s mostly been in service of less manual work, better triaging, and fewer things falling through the cracks, all of which are worthwhile pursuits. What gets less attention amid all the hype, though, is what happens when these tools are wrong. 

I don’t mean catastrophically wrong. I mean quietly wrong: a finding that doesn’t route anywhere, a recommendation no one owns, an automated step that fails without anyone noticing. In most health systems today, nobody can answer the most basic governance question about the AI in their stack: when this tool makes a mistake, who catches it, and how fast can they do so? 

From imaging to documentation to decision support, healthcare teams have integrated ever more models into their workflows to save time and ensure patient engagement loops are properly closed. Each one adds new capability, but each one also adds a new place where something can fail—sometimes silently. As AI touches more of the patient journey, those failure points multiply faster than anyone’s ability to trace them. 

As AI’s role in supporting healthcare workers begins to integrate further with patient care and internal processes, more touchpoints become disconnected and difficult to trace due to a lack of clear governance across the models.

Roughly half of radiology follow-up recommendations are never completed. Patients absorb the delayed diagnoses while health systems absorb the avoidable costs and the liability. In most cases, that failure is hard to notice. There are no alerts. Nothing escalates. The gap becomes visible only when the patient comes back, usually sicker.

What’s Next? Governance that Lives Within the Workflow 

The next wave of digital health differentiation will come from practical AI governance that operates at the workflow level. No single platform can govern every model, workflow, and user action across the enterprise, but what if each platform had governance built in?

Built-in governance means the system knows what should happen after every output. Based on embedded rules, it knows who owns the next step, what the time window is, and what triggers escalation if the step doesn’t happen. Audit trails run from finding to completed action. Committee-level governance asks whether a tool should be deployed. Workflow-level governance asks, every day, whether the tool’s outputs are actually turning into safe care.

The federal HTI-1 Final Rule introduced new algorithm transparency expectations for AI and predictive tools in certified health IT, raising the bar for what clinical users should be able to understand about the tools that support decision-making. That direction reinforces a broader market reality: governance needs to be tied to patient safety and measurable outcomes, not committee rituals.

What Practitioners Should Demand from Vendors

As practitioners, it’s incumbent upon us to demand that the EHR-adjacent vendors we welcome into the walls of the hospital actually set our teams up to succeed. If governance will be baked into all health IT predictive tools, that means that health systems can make decisions based on what models are willing to offer. The key things to look out for include: 

• Role-Based Output Controls: AI outputs should reach the right person, at the right time, every time; ensuring that information gets into the hands of the person equipped to act on it—and that they have the right permissions—protects patient safety, privacy, and the integrity of the workflow
• Audit Trails that Follow Care: Maintaining clear paths along which teams can easily find the source of mistakes prevents patient harm, nips growing issues in the bud, and allows systemic fixes instead of one-off band-aids
• Escalation Pathways: The most dangerous failing in clinical AI isn’t an incorrect finding, it’s a right answer that goes nowhere; vendors should be able to show what happens when a follow-up stalls: who gets notified, on what timeline, and what prevents the case from simply aging out of view— with clear steps already in place, no incidents go without a resolution plan

When we take on the mantle of providing care to patients, the first promise we make is to do no harm. That bond exists between clinicians and patients, but it exists everywhere else, too—and the promise doesn’t stop applying when the work is done by software. When we consider allowing AI into our hospitals and care relationships, how do we ensure these tools strengthen that promise rather than weaken it? How do we know that we are elevating care and not just making things easier for the sake of making things easier? 

Through governance: knowing what the tool touches, who acts on its output, and what happens when it’s wrong. By putting patient safety first in every decision, we keep our oath and build trust with the people healthcare was always supposed to be about.

About Angela Adams

Angela Adams, RN, started her career as a critical care medicine nurse at Duke University Medical Center. Driven to make a broader impact, Angela looked to the emerging healthcare AI segment for solutions that would allow her to help patients as well as assist clinicians to become more effective and efficient in solving complex medical issues. She helped advance AI adoption and overcome skepticism at companies like Jvion (acquired by Lightbeam Health Solutions), where she applied deep machine learning to lower nosocomial event rates and prevent patient deterioration. She went on to create her most recent solution at Inflo Health, where she focuses on missed follow-up radiology appointments.

< + > Raintree Acquires Spike Technologies | Doctronic Expands Into Pediatrics

Check out today’s featured companies who have recently completed an M&A deal, and be sure to check out the full list of past healthcare IT M&A.

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Raintree Acquires Spike Technologies, Bringing Genuinely Agentic AI Voice to Revenue Cycle and Patient Engagement

Native to the EMR, the Acquisition Automates the Most Manual Work in Revenue Cycle Management: The First and Most Critical Step Toward Fully Autonomous RCM for Rehabilitation and Physical Therapy Organizations

Raintree, the leading electronic health record (EHR) and practice management platform for rehabilitation and physical therapy organizations, today announced it has acquired Spike Technologies, a developer of genuinely agentic AI voice technology for healthcare. The acquisition embeds AI voice directly into Raintree’s platform to take on the most tedious, manually intensive work in revenue cycle and patient engagement, including payer calls, claim follow-ups, eligibility and prior authorization, and patient outreach, and marks an important step toward fully autonomous revenue cycle management (RCM).

Revenue cycle work remains one of the most labor-intensive parts of healthcare. Physical therapy practices face an average claim denial rate of roughly 13%, and nearly three-quarters of those denials must be appealed. Front-desk teams spend ten minutes or more per patient on prior authorization alone, and most practices have had to add administrative staff simply to keep up. Industry analyses estimate that AI and automation in the revenue cycle represent up to $360 billion in potential annual savings. By putting genuinely agentic AI voice to work on this manual burden, Raintree and Spike aim to return that time to care.

Unlike scripted phone trees, rules engines, or chatbots layered on top of legacy workflows, the technology is genuinely agentic: AI voice agents that understand context, make decisions, and complete multi-step work, not a fixed menu of options. Because the capability is native to Raintree’s EMR rather than a bolted-on third-party layer, the agents act with full clinical, scheduling, and financial context. It is the foundational piece of a broader vision: fully integrated, agentic orchestration across the entire revenue cycle and patient engagement.

“Getting paid is the hardest, most manual part of running a therapy practice, and voice is where that burden is heaviest. We chose to take on the hardest piece first,” explained Nick Hedges, Raintree CEO…

Full release here, originally announced July 15th, 2026.

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Doctronic Expands Into Pediatrics, Accelerating Its Vision for an AI-Native Primary Care Platform for the Entire Family

Acquisition of Summer Health Brings Leading Text-Based Pediatric Expertise to Doctronic, Extending AI-Powered Primary Care from Birth through Adulthood

Doctronic today announced its expansion into pediatric primary care, marking the next step in its mission to build a comprehensive AI-native primary care platform. To accelerate that vision, the company has acquired Summer Health, the leading platform for virtual, text-based pediatric care.

The expansion reflects a broader shift in healthcare: patients increasingly expect immediate, continuous access to trusted care, yet pediatric primary care remains difficult to access outside traditional office hours. For parents, questions about fevers, feeding, medications, sleep, or development rarely arise on a schedule. By extending its platform to children beginning at birth, Doctronic aims to make high-quality primary care more accessible during the moments families need it most.

Founded in 2022, Summer Health pioneered on-demand, text-based pediatric care, supporting more than 100,000 pediatric encounters for tens of thousands of families. Its conversational model and deep pediatric expertise closely complement Doctronic, which has supported more than 30 million health encounters in just two years through its proprietary AI doctor and nationwide network of licensed clinicians delivering personalized medical guidance and video visits for $39.

“Families don’t experience healthcare in silos,” said Dr. Adam Oskowitz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Doctronic…

Full release here, originally announced July 29th, 2026.

< + > CIO Podcast – Episode 119: Improving Through Data and Research with Eric Lee

For the 119th episode of the CIO podcast hosted by Healthcare IT Today, we are joined by Eric Lee, MD, Chief Health Information Officer at AltaMed Health Services, to talk about improving with data and research! We kick this episode off with Lee sharing his experience with the KLAS Arch Collaborative. Next, we discuss some of the results Lee saw from the survey. Using that same survey, we then get into what Lee has done or is looking to do based on the results. Then Lee shares a recent successful project he’s worked on at AltaMed, and we dig into what went into the project and what made it a success. We then dive into AI to discuss what we now understand about AI in healthcare and what we are still trying to figure out. Lastly, Lee passes along the best piece of advice he’s been given in his career.

Here’s a look at the questions and topics we discuss in this episode:

• What’s been your experience with the KLAS Arch Collaborative?
• What are some of the results you saw from the survey?
• What have you done or what are you looking to do based on these results?
• What’s a recent project you’ve worked on at AltaMed that was a success? What went into the project and what made it a success?
• What do we now understand about AI in healthcare, and what are we still figuring out?
• What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given in your career?

Now, without further ado, we’re excited to share with you the next episode of the CIO Podcast by Healthcare IT Today.

We release a new CIO Podcast every ~2 weeks. You can also subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today podcast on any of the following platforms:

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We’d love to hear what you think of the podcast and if there are other healthcare CIO you’d like to see us have on the program. Feel free to share your thoughts and perspectives in the comments of this post with @techguy on Twitter, or privately on our Contact Us page.

We appreciate you listening!

Listen to the Latest Episodes

< + > What Makes a CIE Work? Five Lessons from the Field

The following is a guest article by Mark Taylor, VP of Product Strategy at Ready Computing

Community Information Exchanges (CIE) are often described as technology initiatives. In practice, the successful ones are much more than that. A CIE works when it helps real people coordinate care across health, social care, government, and community-based organizations without forcing every partner to abandon the systems and workflows they already use.

The goal is not just to exchange data. It is to make it easier to identify needs, connect people to services, close the loop on referrals, measure outcomes, and support the organizations doing the work.

Our experience supporting social care and whole-person care initiatives across New York State’s 1115 Waiver, Georgia’s statewide CIE infrastructure through GaHIN, and the Connect2 network in Washington State has shown that the strongest CIEs share five core traits.

1. They Start with the People and Services, Not the Technology

A CIE should be designed around how people actually move through care. That means understanding where needs are identified, how referrals are made, who follows up, and what information frontline teams need at each step.

In New York’s 1115 Waiver work, the challenge is not simply collecting HRSN screening data. It is helping social care networks operationalize screening, eligibility, referrals, consent, service delivery, and reporting across many different organizations.

The same principle applies in Washington State’s Connect2 network. The value of the platform is not just that data can move. It is that organizations can coordinate around people in a more consistent, connected way.

A working CIE supports the journey from need to service, not just the movement of records.

2. They Connect Existing Systems Instead of Replacing Them

Community networks are diverse by nature. Hospitals, health plans, HIEs, government agencies, social care organizations, and community-based providers often use different tools. A CIE that requires every participant to adopt one new system creates friction before the work even begins.

The stronger model is interoperability. Let organizations keep the systems that already support their operations, while creating a shared infrastructure for exchange, orchestration, and oversight.

This is central to the work we support across these networks. In Washington State, secure, standards-based exchange powers the Connect2 infrastructure. In Georgia, the work with GaHIN supports broader statewide infrastructure that connects health and social care data across a complex ecosystem.

A CIE works when it becomes the connective layer, not another silo.

3. They Build Trust Through Governance, Consent, and Compliance

CIEs handle sensitive information across organizations that may have different responsibilities, regulations, and levels of technical maturity. Trust is essential.

That trust depends on clear rules for participation, strong privacy and consent management, secure hosting, and compliance practices that give partners confidence. This is especially important when social care data is being connected with clinical or payer data.

In New York’s 1115 Waiver environment, consent, eligibility, and service documentation are not side issues. They are foundational to making the model work at scale. In Georgia, statewide exchange requires a similar focus on governance, security, and reliability.

A CIE cannot succeed if participants do not trust how data is protected, shared, and used.

4. They Make Frontline Workflows Easier

The success of a CIE depends heavily on adoption. If the platform adds administrative burden, frontline organizations will struggle to use it consistently.

That means the system needs to support practical workflows: screening, referral management, eligibility checks, service documentation, status updates, closed-loop communication, reporting, and escalation. It also needs to work for organizations with different staffing levels and technical resources.

The best CIEs reduce duplicate entry, make the next step clear, and help teams see what has already happened. They also provide flexibility, because the workflow for housing support may look different from food assistance, transportation, home modifications, or substance use disorder-related services.

A CIE works when it makes coordination simpler for the people doing the coordinating.

5. They Prove Value Through Data, Reporting, and Outcomes

CIEs need to show impact. That means capturing not only referrals, but whether needs were met, services were delivered, gaps remain, and outcomes improved.

For social care networks under the NYS 1115 Waiver, reporting and payment-related workflows are critical. For statewide efforts like GaHIN, the ability to reduce silos and provide a broader view of community health needs is essential. For Connect2, the value lies in creating the infrastructure needed to support more coordinated, community-centered care across the network.

The strongest CIEs create visibility at multiple levels: for care teams, for network operators, for funders, and for policymakers. They help answer practical questions: Who needs help? What services are available? What happened after the referral? Where are the gaps? What is working?

A CIE becomes sustainable when it can demonstrate measurable value.

A successful CIE is not defined by a single platform, referral tool, or data standard. It is defined by whether it helps communities work together more effectively.

The most effective CIEs are built around people, designed for interoperability, grounded in trust, aligned with frontline workflows, and measured by outcomes. Across New York State, Georgia, and Washington State, one lesson is clear: CIEs work when they connect more than systems. They connect organizations, services, and people around a shared model of care.

About Mark Taylor

Mark Taylor is VP of Product Strategy at Ready Computing, a healthcare technology leader with experience advancing interoperability and connected care across complex health and social care networks. He focuses on how technology can help organizations coordinate services, address social needs, and support more connected models of care.