Cumulus and Partners Chosen as Final Winners of the ACL Social Care Referrals Challenge

Cumulus and its partners are final winners of the Administration for Community Living’s Social Care Referrals Challenge. The three-phase challenge was a competition to identify IT solutions to support health care systems and community-based organizations to facilitate social care referrals and information sharing between organizations, systems, and platforms – a perfect fit for Cumulus.

Cumulus participated in the challenge as part of the Missouri Aging Services Data Collaborative, comprised of Cumulus, the Missouri Association of Area Agencies on Aging (MA4), the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) Community Innovation & Action Center, and Long Term Care Innovation, Inc. (LTCI). The project successfully positioned Cumulus as an interoperability hub to facilitate information sharing between organizations, systems, and platforms. The project also developed the Aging Services Dataset and Interoperability Standards (ASDIS), which categorize and organize hundreds of commonly used data elements and can be used to exchange data between partners and payers, regardless of which existing data system or vendor they use.

In addition to winning the Phase 3 award, The Missouri Aging Services Collaborative team was also awarded the ACL Social Care Referrals Challenge Bonus Phase award for using machine learning technology to translate and match terms used in nationally recognized social risk screening tools with terms used by service providers. A demonstration of the project included mapping Gravity Project Food Insecurity data elements with Nutritional Risk Screening data elements for Older Americans Act programs as a baseline for reporting.

For more information, please see the official press release from ACL.